The Life Span Development Of Social Working Memory And The Theory Of Mind And Their Interrelationships

Working memory is the basis of various cognitive activities,and the mechanisms of its maturation and decline have been one of the central topics in the field of developmental psychology.However,as social animals,human beings are very dependent on social information for their daily normal activities and interactions.Recent studies have found that working memory for social information(social working memory)is independent from that for general physical information(canonical working memory)and plays an important role in people’s higher social cognitive activities.However,no studies have examined its developmental patterns and its relationship to higher social cognitive abilities from a lifespan developmental perspective.The present study explores and discusses this topic in detail with a sample of subjects spanning a wide age range(3-85 years).Study 1 explored the development of social working memory,descripting and comparing the developmental trajectories of social working memory and canonical cognitive working memory.We used a change detection paradigm to measure social working memory and canonical working memory capacity in subjects from preschool age to old age.The results showed that both social working memory and canonical working memory had an inverted U-shaped developmental trajectory,with rapid development during childhood(8-10 years),maturation during the later adolescent.And social working memory showed a storage advantage over general working memory,which emerged in early adolescence,persisted into adulthood,and gradually faded in middle and old age.Given the close developmental association between social working memory and higher social cognitive abilities,the second study examined the link between social working memory and theory of mind from a lifespan developmental perspective based on Study 1.We measured theory of mind in school-age,childhood,and adolescent to middle-aged subjects using the Wellman Theory of Mind Scale,the child and adult version of reading the mind in the eyes task,respectively,and compared their relationship with social working memory and general cognitive working memory,showing that the development of social working memory was more closely associated with theory of mind than canonical cognitive working memory,especially during the critical period of maturation and decline of social working memory.This paper is the first to reveal the developmental trajectory of social working memory and canonical cognitive working memory from a lifespan developmental perspective,to explore the similarities and differences in their development,and to further reveal the unique developmental connections between social working memory and the theory of mind.The study further improves and enriches the research framework in the academic field of social work memory and makes a unique contribution to the in-depth understanding of the development of human social cognition.