Dumontheil Iroise, Jensen Sarah K G, Wood Nicholas W, Meyer Meghan L, Lieberman Matthew D, Blakemore Sarah-Jayne
a Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience , University College London , London , UK.
Soc Neurosci. 2014;9(5):437-51. doi: 10.1080/17470919.2014.925503. Epub 2014 Jun 3.
Working memory (WM) refers to mental processes that enable temporary retention and manipulation of information, including information about other people ("social working memory"). Previous studies have demonstrated that nonsocial WM is supported by dopamine neurotransmission. Here, we investigated in 131 healthy adults whether dopamine is similarly involved in social WM by testing whether social and nonsocial WM are influenced by genetic variants in three genes coding for molecules regulating the availability of dopamine in the brain: catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT), dopamine active transporter (DAT), and monoamine-oxidase A (MAOA). An advantage for the Met allele of COMT was observed in the two standard WM tasks and in the social WM task. However, the influence of COMT on social WM performance was not accounted for by its influence on either standard WM paradigms. There was no main effect of DAT1 or MAOA, but a significant COMT x DAT1 interaction on social WM performance. This study provides novel preliminary evidence of effects of genetic variants of the dopamine neurotransmitter system on social cognition. The results further suggest that the effects observed on standard WM do not explain the genetic effects on effortful social cognition.
工作记忆（WM）是指能够临时保留和处理信息的心理过程，包括有关他人的信息（“社会工作记忆”）。先前的研究表明，非社会工作记忆受多巴胺神经传递的支持。在此，我们对131名健康成年人进行了研究，通过测试社会和非社会工作记忆是否受大脑中调节多巴胺可用性的三种分子编码基因的遗传变异影响，来探究多巴胺是否同样参与社会工作记忆：儿茶酚-O-甲基转移酶（COMT）、多巴胺活性转运体（DAT）和单胺氧化酶A（MAOA）。在两项标准工作记忆任务和社会工作记忆任务中均观察到COMT的Met等位基因具有优势。然而，COMT对社会工作记忆表现的影响并非由其对任何标准工作记忆范式的影响所导致。DAT1或MAOA没有主效应，但COMT与DAT1在社会工作记忆表现上存在显著交互作用。本研究为多巴胺神经递质系统的遗传变异对社会认知的影响提供了新的初步证据。结果进一步表明，在标准工作记忆上观察到的效应并不能解释对费力社会认知的遗传效应。
