Psychology Department, University of California Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Front Psychol. 2012 Dec 21;3:571. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00571. eCollection 2012.
Navigating the social world requires the ability to maintain and manipulate information about people's beliefs, traits, and mental states. We characterize this capacity as social working memory (SWM). To date, very little research has explored this phenomenon, in part because of the assumption that general working memory systems would support working memory for social information. Various lines of research, however, suggest that social cognitive processing relies on a neurocognitive network (i.e., the "mentalizing network") that is functionally distinct from, and considered antagonistic with, the canonical working memory network. Here, we review evidence suggesting that demanding social cognition requires SWM and that both the mentalizing and canonical working memory neurocognitive networks support SWM. The neural data run counter to the common finding of parametric decreases in mentalizing regions as a function of working memory demand and suggest that the mentalizing network can support demanding cognition, when it is demanding social cognition. Implications for individual differences in social cognition and pathologies of social cognition are discussed.
在社交世界中导航需要维持和操纵关于人们的信仰、特征和心理状态的信息的能力。我们将这种能力描述为社会工作记忆（SWM）。迄今为止，很少有研究探索这种现象，部分原因是假设一般工作记忆系统将支持社交信息的工作记忆。然而，各种研究表明，社会认知处理依赖于一个神经认知网络（即“心理化网络”），它在功能上与经典的工作记忆网络不同，并且被认为与之对立。在这里，我们回顾了一些证据，表明需要社会认知的 SWM 以及心理化和经典工作记忆神经认知网络都支持 SWM。神经数据与心理化区域作为工作记忆需求函数的参数减少的常见发现背道而驰，并且表明当涉及到需要社会认知时，心理化网络可以支持苛刻的认知。讨论了社会认知个体差异和社会认知病理学的含义。
