Abstract: Present study explores the influence of social exclusion on the visual working memory capacity (WMC) of nonsocial and social stimuli. A cyberball game was used to manipulate social exclusion. Nonsense shapes (NS) in study 1 were adopted as nonsocial stimuli, while biology motion (BM) in study 2a and human faces in study 2b were adopted as social stimuli. In study 1, 49 participants were asked to remember 1 - 4 NS. The results showed that socially excluded participants had a lower WMC than the socially accepted group. In Experiment 2a and 2b, 44 and 54 participants were asked to remember 1-5 BM and 1 - 4 human faces showing three different emotions (angry, happy, neutral). The results demonstrated that socially excluded participants had a larger WMC than the compared group in BM and three types of emotional face. The results of study 1 and 2 suggested social exclusion would exert an influence on individual's visual WMC, but the direction of this effect may be inconsistent due to the different attributes of the stimuli, when the stimulus is non-social stimuli unrelated to belonging need, social exclusion would reduce the individual's visual WMC. When the stimulus is social stimuli associated with the belonging need (neutral & emotional), the visual WMC of the individual would increase.

Key words: social exclusion, visual working memory capacity, nonsocial stimuli, social stimuli

摘要： 采用变化探测范式，考察社会排斥对非社会和社会性刺激视觉工作记忆容量的影响。发现社会排斥组的无意义图形视觉工作记忆容量显著小于社会接纳组，而对生物运动和面孔的记忆容量却显著大于社会接纳组。说明社会排斥对不同属性刺激的视觉工作记忆容量影响不同：会损害与归属需要无关的非社会性刺激的记忆容量，而提高与归属需要有关的社会性刺激的记忆容量。

关键词: 社会排斥, 视觉工作记忆容量, 非社会性刺激, 社会性刺激