Dr. Wanze Xie is an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and the IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Peking University (PKU). He earned his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of South Carolina in 2017. From 2017 to 2021, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Nelson Lab at Harvard Medical School before joining PKU.
Dr. Xie’s research focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying emotion and attention development, with a particular emphasis on visual attention and face/emotion perception across infancy and childhood. He is deeply interested in understanding the causes and mechanisms driving behavioral changes in children, and his recent work also investigates how early adverse experiences shape brain health and cognitive development. To address these questions rigorously, his research integrates multimodal methodologies, including behavioral measures (e.g., eye-tracking), physiological recordings (ECG, EEG/ERP), and neuroimaging techniques (cortical source localization, fNIRS, MRI). Dr. Xie is committed to open science principles by sharing datasets and analysis codes through collaborative networks.
Dr. Wanze Xie serves on the editorial board for Developmental Science and Frontiers in Psychiatry. He was named as an APS Rising Star in 2022 by the Association of Psychological Science.
LINKS
Full-list of publications on Google Scholar
Review record on Publons
Github Account: https://github.com/happytudouni
Selected Publications († supervised students; * Corresponding author):
Huang, S. †, Pollak, S., & Xie, W*. (2025). Conceptual knowledge increasingly supports emotion understanding as perceptual contribution declines with age. Nature Communications, 16 (1), 1-13.
Wang, Y. †, Lei, T. †, Xie, W., & Su, Y*. (2025). Children's neural processing of the misfortunes and fortunes of prosocial and antisocial individuals. Developmental science, 28(4), e70030.
Xie, W.*, Cheng, C.*, & Huang, S†. (2025). The neurodevelopmental roots of interactions between attention and working memory during infancy. Developmental Review, 76, 101199.
Xie, W.*, Toll, R. T., & Nelson, C. A. (2022). EEG functional connectivity analysis in the source space. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 101119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2022.101119
Xie, W.*, Bathelt, J. Fasman, A., Nelson, C.A., & Bosquet Enlow, M. (2022). Temperament and psychopathology: The “community” to which you belong matters. Child Development, 93(4), 995–1011. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13742
Xie, W.*, Leppänen, J. M., Kane-Grade, F. E., & Nelson, C. A*. (2021). Converging neural and behavioral evidence for a rapid, generalized response to threat-related facial expressions in 3-year-old children. NeuroImage, 117732.
Xie, W.*, Jensen, S.K.G., Wade, M., Kumar, S. Westerlund, A., Kakon, S.H., Haque, R., Petri, W.A., & Nelson, C.A.* (2019). Growth faltering is associated with altered brain functional connectivity and cognitive outcomes in urban Bangladeshi children exposed to early adversity. BMC Medicine. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-019-1431-5
Xie, W., McCormick. S.A., Westerlund, A., Bowman, L.C., & Nelson, C. A*. (2019). Neural correlates of facial emotion processing in infancy. Developmental Science, e12758, DOI: 10.1111/desc.12758.
Xie, W.*, Mallin, B., & Richards, J. E. (2019). Development of brain functional connectivity and its relation to infant sustained attention in the first year of life. Developmental Science, e12702. DOI: 10.1111/desc.12703.
Xie, W.*, Mallin, & Richards, J. E. (2018). Development of infant sustained attention and its relation to EEG oscillations: An EEG and cortical source analysis study. Developmental Science, e12562. DOI: 10.1111/desc.12562.
Xie, W.*, & Richards, J. E. (2017). The relation between infant covert orienting, Sustained Attention and Brain Activity. Brain Topography, 30(2), 198-219.
Xie, W.*, & Richards, J. E. (2016). Effects of interstimulus intervals on behavioral, heart rate, and event‐related potential indices of infant engagement and sustained attention. Psychophysiology, 53, 1128-1142.
Xie, W.*, Richards, J. E., Lei, D., Zhu, H., Lee, K., & Gong, Q. (2015). The construction of MRI brain/head templates for Chinese children from 7 to 16 years of age. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 15, 94-105.
Xie, W.*, Richards, J. E., Lei, D., Lee, K., & Gong, Q. (2015). Comparison of the brain development trajectory between Chinese and US children and adolescents. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 8, 249.
Book Chapters:
Xie, W. & Nelson, C.A. (2021). The state-of-the-art pediatric EEG and MRI-compatible EEG. In Huang, H. & Roberts, T. (Ed.), Handbook of Paediatric brain imaging: Methods, Modalities and Applications. Elsevier, under the imprint of Academic Press: Cambridge, MA.
Downes, M., Bathelt, J., & Xie, W. (2021). Electroencephalography. In Crosson, B., Haaland, K., & King, T. (Ed.), APA Handbook of Neuropsychology, Vol 2. American Psychological Association.
Xie, W. & Richards, J.E. (2021). Cortical source localization of EEG time-frequency activation. In Bernat, E., Miller M., & Gable, P. (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of EEG Frequency Analyses. Oxford University Press: New York, NY.
Richards, J. E., & Xie, W. (2015). Brains for all the ages: Structural neurodevelopment in infants and children from a life-span perspective. In Benson, J. (Ed.), Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 48, 1-52. Elsevier: Philadelphia, PA.