Abstract
Can we predict the future by reading others’ minds? This study explores whether attributing others’ personality traits facilitates predictions about their future actions and the temporal order of these future actions. Prior evidence demonstrated that the posterior cerebellar crus is involved in identifying the temporal sequence of social actions and the person’s traits they imply. Based on this, we hypothesized that this area might also be recruited in the reverse process; that is, knowledge of another person’s personality traits supports predictions of temporal sequences of others’ actions. In this study, participants were informed about the trait of a person and then had to select actions that were consistent with this information and arrange them in the most likely temporal order. As hypothesized, the posterior cerebellar crus 1 and crus 2 were strongly activated when compared to a control task which involved only the selection of actions (without temporal ordering) or which depicted non-social objects and their characteristics. Our findings highlight the important function of the posterior cerebellar crus in the prediction of social action sequences in social understanding.
Highlights
As human beings we navigate through our social environments reading the minds of others and anticipate future interactions based on this information
A large scale seminal meta-analysis by Van Overwalle et al (2014) which included over 350 functional magnetic resonance imaging studies involving a large variety of social cognitive tasks, revealed robust activation of the cerebellum in social cognition tasks in over one third of studies included across the majority of tasks
Perhaps more critical for the present research, in a recent study by Pu et al (2020), participants were asked to remember the temporal order of social action sequences that implied the same trait of the agent, and the results revealed that the posterior cerebellar Crus was recruited in comparison with social events without sequencing instruction and non-social sequencing
Summary
As human beings we navigate through our social environments reading the minds of others and anticipate future interactions based on this information This dynamic ability to attribute mental states to others is called social mentalizing and involves reading mental states such as desires, intentions and personality traits in social contexts (Molenberghs et al, 2016; Schurz et al, 2014; Van Overwalle, 2009). A large scale seminal meta-analysis by Van Overwalle et al (2014) which included over 350 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies involving a large variety of social cognitive tasks, revealed robust activation of the cerebellum in social cognition tasks in over one third of studies included across the majority of tasks These findings were further reinforced by fMRI studies demonstrating that there was a distinct functional connectivity between the posterior cerebellar Crus and cortical mentalizing areas during social mentalizing (Van Overwalle, Van de Steen, & Mariën, 2019; Van Overwalle, Van de Steen, van Dun, & Heleven, 2020). The role of the cerebellum has been confirmed by Yeo et al (2011), who identified a distinct “default mode” network in the cerebrum encompassing social mentalizing (Andrews-Hanna, Reidler, Sepulcre, Poulin, & Buckner, 2010), which extends to the posterior cerebellum (Buckner et al, 2011)
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