The Social Working Memory

Working memory ( working memory ) is a type of memory that refers to the ability to manage information temporarily during a task. In this context, we will analyze what is, specifically, social working memory.

We live in a social environment and our ability to carry out social cognitive processes characterizes us as a species. We are constantly manipulating social information : putting ourselves in the place of the other in a conversation, taking into account what the person has told us minutes before, collecting and valuing ideas from the person we just met …

In fact, this need to handle cognitive social demands was crucial in our evolution, playing a fundamental role in the development of our brain, according to the “social brain hypothesis”.

In cognitive psychology, the higher social cognitive processes, such as the theory of mind, have traditionally been studied. However, the basic processes have been observed from a more computational point of view, of managing general information.

What is social work memory?

The memory of social work consists of the handling of specific cognitive information of social processes. That is, the process that we start our ability to think about the mental states, beliefs and intentions of others. This ability is called “mentalization” and social work memory refers to its more procedural nature.

When we carry out a mentalization process, we have to access, maintain and manipulate information about ourselves or another person, and draw certain conclusions about the mental state.

First Findings

The results that have led us to think about the existence of a specifically social working memory are based on evidence that, when the social cognitive load increases, the performance of mentalization decreases. This is because working memory (TM) is a limited capacity, and increasing information reduces resources for drawing conclusions.

Thus, people show more errors when drawing conclusions about the mental state of others when the amount of information to be taken into account increases. For example, when they are presented with the idea “ Maria thinks that Juan knew that Laura wanted to go to the store ”.

What happens in the brain

Apparently, there could be two brain networks involved in social working memory : the mentalization network and the cognitive TM network.

• The mentalization network comprises the frontoparietal regions, the temporal poles, and the superior temporal posterior sulcus. This network is activated when we make inferences about the mental states of others, attributing emotions, personality traits or predicting how they will behave based on their beliefs and thoughts.
• On the other hand, in the cognitive TM network, the brain areas that are activated are generally the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the lateral parietal cortex and supplementary motor areas. In addition, the activation is greater the more information has to be handled.

The study

To assess social working memory and observe which regions are activated, pioneering researchers in this topic created a task.

At first, the evaluated person is presented with a list of 3 or 4 names of their friends. After a few seconds, an adjective appears (for example, funny) and the person has to mentally order their friends based on that trait. Afterwards, he is shown a possibility (“Carlos is the second funniest) and he must indicate whether it is true or false.

The results showed that, in the time spent doing the ranking, the activity in the mentalization and cognitive working memory networks increased as a function of the number of friends presented.

Therefore, the researchers have concluded that the mentalization regions support the processes of social cognition. Furthermore, the cognitive TM network, although it is activated in an inverse way to that of mentalization, in the context of social tasks seem to operate together.

There are still many questions to discover around this new concept. However, the results obtained will be very useful to understand more details about the social cognitive deficit that some disorders present, such as schizophrenia or autism spectrum disorders.