Princeton University, Department of Psychology, Green Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
Neuroimage. 2013 Apr 15;70:233-9. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.12.063. Epub 2013 Jan 5.
Humans possess unique social abilities that set us apart from other species. These abilities may be partially supported by a large capacity for maintaining and manipulating social information. Efficient social working memory might arise from two different sources: chunking of social information or a domain-specific buffer. We test these hypotheses with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) by manipulating sociality and working memory load in an n-back paradigm. We observe (i) an effect of load in the frontoparietal control network, (ii) an effect of sociality in regions associated with social cognition and face processing, and (iii) an interaction within the frontoparietal network such that social load has a smaller effect than nonsocial load. These results support the hypothesis that working memory is more efficient for social information than for nonsocial information, and suggest that chunking, rather than a domain-specific buffer, is the mechanism of this greater efficiency.
人类拥有独特的社交能力，这使我们有别于其他物种。这些能力可能部分依赖于大量维持和处理社交信息的能力。高效的社交工作记忆可能有两个不同的来源：社交信息的分组或特定领域的缓冲区。我们通过在 n-back 范式中操纵社交性和工作记忆负荷，利用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）来检验这些假设。我们观察到：（i）在额顶控制网络中存在负荷效应，（ii）在与社会认知和面部处理相关的区域中存在社会性效应，以及（iii）在额顶网络中存在交互作用，使得社会负荷的影响小于非社会负荷。这些结果支持了这样的假设，即工作记忆对于社交信息比非社交信息更有效率，并且表明这种更高效率的机制是分组，而不是特定领域的缓冲区。
