The Involuntary Processing Of Social Information In Working Memory

Human beings distinct from other primates by their outstanding social cognitive skills,which is to understand others via their beliefs,desires,intentions,and traits.The practice of complex social interactions inevitably require individuals to maintain and manipulate social information in working memory.However,the classical theories of working memory majorly focused on the physical attribution of objects,namely the storage and processing of physical information.Until recently,a few researches referred to the storage of social information in working memory,and several studies explored the relationship between social working memory and social cognitive ability.Hence the social information processing mechanism in working memory remained unclear.Previous studies demonstrated that social information can be processed involuntarily in long-term memory(Uleman,Newman,&Moskowitz,1996b).And in visual working memory,objects could be integrated automatically based on the Gestalt principle of organization(Shen,Xu,Zhang,Shui,Zhang,&Zhou,2015;Z.Gao,Gao,Tang,Shui,&Shen,2015).Therefore,we assume that the social information stored in working memory should be involuntarily processed as well.To test our hypothesis,we produced first-person social network status(trait-implying sentences vs trait-included sentences)and friends' impressions(descriptions and traits)as experimental stimuli based on the Big-Five personality descriptions.In experiment 1 and experiment 2,we adopted the false recognition paradigm,in which subjects were required to memorize the contents of the social network status.The results suggested that individuals could spontaneously infer the traits from trait-implying sentences,without explicit goals of trait inference or awareness of the inferring processes.In experiment 3,we adopted a serial reproduction paradigm to test this effect in a different way.Subjects in first generations were required to memorize friends' impressions(descriptions)and pick them from the word list(descriptions and traits).There were two conditions of the initial memory items,which referred to the random condition(low structured)and the main personality condition(highly structured).The responses of the previous generation would be passed to the next generation as memory items.The results indicated that subjects would pick the traits corresponding to the descriptions.This cognitive bias would be amplified during the social-transmission chain.As a result,the number of correct traits would increase through the chain.Besides,the overall structural degree of the friends,impressions increased in this course,which facilitated the trait inference.Overall,these results revealed that there is a involuntary processing of social information in working memory.Individuals could spontaneously infer the corresponding trait based on the description of other people,and it happens automatically and unconsciously.Social information stored in working memory could become more structured,and this structuralization process will be facilitated if the input information has a potential structure.