Publications by authors named "Kaixiang Zhuang"

Article Synopsis
  • Creativity is measured through divergent thinking (DT), a complex cognitive ability that involves various brain processes like memory and attention.
  • Researchers used fMRI and machine learning to uncover specific neural patterns that predict DT, confirming their findings with genetic data and resting-state fMRI results.
  • DT is linked to brain regions involved in different cognitive functions, showing a strong relationship with dopamine-related neurotransmitters, which enhances our understanding of the neuroscience behind creativity.
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Semantic memory offers a rich repository of raw materials (e.g., various concepts and connections between concepts) for creative thinking, represented as a semantic network.

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Novelty and appropriateness are two fundamental components of creativity. However, the way in which novelty and appropriateness are separated at behavioral and neural levels remains poorly understood. In the present study, we aim to distinguish behavioral and neural bases of novelty and appropriateness of creative idea generation.

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Preserving a normal body mass index (BMI) is crucial for the healthy growth and development of children. As a core aspect of executive functions, inhibitory control plays a pivotal role in maintaining a normal BMI, which is key to preventing issues of childhood obesity. By studying individual variations in inhibitory control performance and its associated connectivity-based neuromarker in a sample of primary school students ( = 64; 9-12 yr), we aimed to unravel the pathway through which inhibitory control impacts children's BMI.

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Article Synopsis
  • * Using advanced imaging techniques, researchers found that increased BMI leads to changes in brain activity states, particularly limiting transitions to states associated with higher cognitive functions.
  • * Findings suggest that these altered brain dynamics contribute to negative outcomes associated with obesity, providing new insights into the brain's role in mental health issues connected to weight.
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Complex cognitive processes, like creative thinking, rely on interactions among multiple neurocognitive processes to generate effective and innovative behaviors on demand, for which the brain's connector hubs play a crucial role. However, the unique contribution of specific hub sets to creative thinking is unknown. Employing three functional magnetic resonance imaging datasets (total N = 1,911), we demonstrate that connector hub sets are organized in a hierarchical manner based on diversity, with "control-default hubs"-which combine regions from the frontoparietal control and default mode networks-positioned at the apex.

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Recent studies and reviews suggest that creative thinking is at least partly a domain-general cognitive ability, dependent on consistent patterns of brain activity including co-activation of the executive control and default mode networks. However, the degree to which the generation of ideas in different creative tasks relies on common brain activity remains unknown. In this fMRI study, participants were asked to generate creative ideas in both a uses generation task and a metaphor production task.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Creativity is essential for economic and social advancement, but it's tough to measure objectively; this study proposes three indicators based on semantic distance in writing to evaluate creativity.
  • - The research shows that both global and local semantic distances can predict the originality and rationality of stories, while global cohesion relates to how well the text fits its context.
  • - Different neural networks are involved in these creative assessments: the salience and default networks relate to overall creativity, while the control network links to the coherence of the narrative, confirming the need to distinguish between creativity dimensions.
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Poetry composition is an ecologically valid approach for investigating creative processes. However, little is known about how the brain creates poetry and about the role of knowledge during poetry composition. Here, we identified patterns of task-based functional connectivity during poetry composition by experts and novices under two experimental conditions (familiar vs unfamiliar themes) and one control condition.

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Creativity, the ability to generate original and valuable products, has long been linked to semantic retrieval processes. The associative theory of creativity posits flexible retrieval ability as an important basis for creative idea generation. However, there is insufficient research on how flexible memory retrieval acts on creative activities.

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The ability to suppress unwelcome memories is important for productivity and well-being. Successful memory suppression is associated with hippocampal deactivations and a concomitant disruption of this region's functionality. Much of the previous neuroimaging literature exploring such suppression-related hippocampal modulations has focused on the region's negative coupling with the prefrontal cortex.

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Objectives: This study aims to reveal the individual differences in Neuroticism and cognitive flexibility among successful restrained eaters (SREs), unsuccessful restrained eaters (UREs), and non-restrained eaters (NREs). Moreover, this study is dedicated to investigating whether certain personality traits and cognitive flexibility could concurrently influence disinhibited eating behaviors among restrained eaters and reveal the pathways through which they interact.

Methods: Female participants aged 17 and 24 years (NREs = 23; SREs = 24; UREs = 23) were assessed with body mass index (BMI) and appetite state measurement, the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ), the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI), and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule.

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Positive risk-taking is a crucial element of individual creativity and social development. However, little is known regarding the relation between individual neural differences and positive risk-taking. In addition, critical thinking (CT) and gender have been proven to be two important individual-specific factors associated with risk-taking behaviour, and different levels of CT and gender may have diverse effects on the relationship between brain structure and positive risk-taking.

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Stressful life events are significant risk factors for depression, and increases in depressive symptoms have been observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this study is to explore the neural makers for individuals' depression during COVID-19, using connectome-based predictive modeling (CPM). Then we tested whether these neural markers could be used to identify groups at high/low risk for depression with a longitudinal dataset.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the relationship between creativity and the unimodal-transmodal gradient in the human brain's functional connectome.
  • Data from young adults show that higher creative performance is linked to specific spatial arrangements of brain areas, notably greater distances between primary and transmodal regions and closer proximity between certain networks.
  • These findings support the idea that the brain's gradient organization plays a key role in facilitating high-order cognitive functions like creativity.
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Openness to experience and divergent thinking are considered to be critical in real-life creative achievement. However, there is still a lack of neural evidence to explain how creative achievement is related to openness to experience and divergent thinking. Here, a structural equation model and resting-state functional connectivity were used to investigate their relationships in college students.

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Accumulating evidence indicates that structural and functional abnormalities in hippocampal formation are linked to major depressive disorder (MDD). However, the resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) of hippocampal subfields in MDD remains unclear. This cross-sectional study aimed to investigate the RSFC of hippocampal subfields in a large sample of MDD patients.

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Backgrounds And Aims: Internet addiction (IA) is a common internet-related addictive behavior. An enormous amount of previous research on IA disorders (IADs) have paid attention to the neural basis of abnormalities, while few studies have elucidated the neural distinctions of IA tendency in general population.

Methods: The current study examined the neural basis of IA tendency combining with voxel-based morphometry (VBM) from the average student body (N = 244).

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Article Synopsis
  • - This study explores how semantic memory networks in the brain relate to creative thinking, using tasks to assess creativity and analyze individual semantic networks.
  • - Researchers found a significant link between creative thinking abilities and specific topological properties of these semantic networks, highlighting a role for the left temporal pole cortex in this relationship.
  • - The findings suggest that the efficiency of an individual's semantic network mediates the connection between brain structure in the left temporal pole and creativity, representing a novel integration of behavioral and neuroimaging approaches to study creative processes.
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Neuroticism is one of the main endophenotypes of major depressive disorder (MDD) and is closely related to the negative effect systems of Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) domains. The relationship between neuroticism and aging is dynamic and complex. Moreover, reduced hippocampal volumes are probably the most frequently reported structural neuroimaging finding associated with MDD.

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Objective: Increased anxiety in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been widely noted. The purpose of this study was to test whether the prepandemic functional connectome predicted individual anxiety induced by the pandemic.

Methods: Anxiety scores from healthy undergraduate students were collected during the severe and remission periods of the pandemic (first survey, February 22-28, 2020, N=589; second survey, April 24 to May 1, 2020, N=486).

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Although the unity and diversity model of executive functions (EFs) has been replicated, there are some studies questioning the validity of the EFs construct. This debate can be partially resolved by directly combining the brain activity pattern in different executive control processes. Previous univariate activation studies have suggested that the neural substrates of different EFs (e.

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Memory suppression (MS) is essential for mental well-being. However, no studies have explored how intrinsic resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) predicts this ability. Here, we adopted the connectome-based predictive modeling (CPM) based on the resting-state fMRI data to investigate whether and how rs-FC profiles in predefined brain networks (the frontoparietal control networks or FPCN) can predict MS in healthy individuals with 497 participants.

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Although many studies have explored the neural mechanism of the feeling of stress, to date, no effort has been made to establish a model capable of predicting the feeling of stress at the individual level using the resting-state functional connectome. Although individuals may be confronted with multidimensional stressors during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, their appraisal of the impact and severity of these events might vary. In this study, connectome-based predictive modeling (CPM) with leave-one-out cross-validation was conducted to predict individual perceived stress (PS) from whole-brain functional connectivity data from 817 participants.

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Creative thinking is a hallmark of human cognition, which enables us to generate novel and useful ideas. Nevertheless, its emergence within the macro-scale neurocognitive circuitry remains largely unknown. Using resting-state fMRI data from two large population samples (SWU: n = 931; HCP: n = 1001) and a novel "travelling pattern prediction analysis", here we identified the modularized functional connectivity patterns linked to creative thinking ability, which concurrently explained individual variability across ordinary cognitive abilities such as episodic memory, working memory and relational processing.

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