Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Feb 7;109(6):1883-8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1121077109. Epub 2012 Jan 23.
Keeping track of various amounts of social cognitive information, including people's mental states, traits, and relationships, is fundamental to navigating social interactions. However, to date, no research has examined which brain regions support variable amounts of social information processing ("social load"). We developed a social working memory paradigm to examine the brain networks sensitive to social load. Two networks showed linear increases in activation as a function of increasing social load: the medial frontoparietal regions implicated in social cognition and the lateral frontoparietal system implicated in nonsocial forms of working memory. Of these networks, only load-dependent medial frontoparietal activity was associated with individual differences in social cognitive ability (trait perspective-taking). Although past studies of nonsocial load have uniformly found medial frontoparietal activity decreases with increasing task demands, the current study demonstrates these regions do support increasing mental effort when such effort engages social cognition. Implications for the etiology of clinical disorders that implicate social functioning and potential interventions are discussed.
跟踪各种社会认知信息，包括人们的心理状态、特征和人际关系，是驾驭社交互动的基础。然而，迄今为止，尚无研究探讨哪些大脑区域支持可变数量的社会信息处理（“社会负荷”）。我们开发了一种社会工作记忆范式来研究对社会负荷敏感的脑网络。两个网络的激活随着社会负荷的增加呈线性增加：内侧额顶叶区域与社会认知有关，外侧额顶叶系统与非社会形式的工作记忆有关。在这些网络中，只有依赖负荷的内侧额顶叶活动与社会认知能力（特质换位思考）的个体差异相关。尽管过去对非社会性负荷的研究一致发现，随着任务需求的增加，内侧额顶叶活动会减少，但目前的研究表明，当这种努力涉及社会认知时，这些区域确实支持增加心理努力。讨论了涉及社会功能的临床障碍的病因和潜在干预措施的含义。
