Social Working Memory Training Improves Perspective-Taking Accuracy

Despite the importance of perspective taking for navigating the social world, even healthy adults frequently misinterpret what other people think and feel. Yet, to date, no research examines whether perspective-taking accuracy can be improved among healthy adult samples. Building off of work suggesting that social working memory (SWM) capacity (i.e., the ability to maintain and manipulate social cognitive information in mind) predicts perspective-taking skills, we developed a novel SWM training intervention to test the hypothesis that SWM training improves perspective-taking accuracy. Participants were randomly assigned to complete 12 days of either SWM training or nonsocial, cognitive working memory (CWM) training (active control condition). Perspective-taking accuracy was assessed pre- and posttraining. SWM training significantly increased perspective-taking accuracy and these improvements significantly surpassed improvements made by participants who underwent CWM training. SWM training therefore may be an efficient route toward improved perspective-taking accuracy.