Maehara Yukio, Saito Satoru
Department of Cognitive Psychology in Education, Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University, Yoshida-Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Japan.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2011 Nov;138(3):367-76. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.09.009. Epub 2011 Oct 6.
Although an increasing number of studies on adults have indicated that working memory (WM) contributes to the ability to understand the mental states of others (i.e., theory of mind), the detailed mechanism by which WM contributes to successful reasoning has not previously been revealed. This study shows that WM modulates the degree of attribution of one's own knowledge to others' mental states. Participants were asked to read a story twice (Experiment 2) or as carefully as possible (Experiment 3) and to estimate the probability percentages of possible choices for a naive protagonist's behavior. The participants were then asked to maintain either a two- or seven-letter alphabet string (i.e., a light or heavy WM load, respectively) during the probability estimation but not during the story comprehension. The results showed that compared to the participants with a light WM load, those with a heavy WM load estimated a significantly higher probability of the choice indicating that the protagonist would behave on the basis of a fact that the participants knew but the protagonist did not. This result indicates that WM moderates the extent to which adults attribute their own knowledge to others' mental states. The role of WM in theory of mind and in heuristic strategy for making probability judgments was then discussed.
尽管越来越多针对成年人的研究表明，工作记忆（WM）有助于理解他人心理状态的能力（即心理理论），但此前尚未揭示WM促成成功推理的详细机制。本研究表明，WM会调节个体将自身知识归因于他人心理状态的程度。要求参与者阅读一个故事两遍（实验2）或尽可能仔细地阅读（实验3），并估计一个天真的主人公行为的可能选择的概率百分比。然后要求参与者在概率估计期间而非故事理解期间保持一个由两个或七个字母组成的字母串（即分别为轻度或重度WM负荷）。结果表明，与轻度WM负荷的参与者相比，重度WM负荷的参与者估计主人公基于参与者知道但主人公不知道的事实行事的选择概率显著更高。这一结果表明，WM调节了成年人将自身知识归因于他人心理状态的程度。随后讨论了WM在心理理论和概率判断启发式策略中的作用。
