Abstract
Social neuroscience largely ignored the role of the cerebellum, despite its implications in a broad range of tasks and neurological disorders related to social functioning and inferences on others’ mental state such as beliefs. One hypothesis states that during human evolution, the cerebellum’s function evolved from a mere coordinator of fluent sequences of motions and actions, to an interpreter of action sequences without overt movements that are important for social understanding. The present study introduces new tasks to investigate the role of the cerebellum in sequencing, in which participants generated the correct chronological order of new or well-known event stories with or without social elements during functional neuroimaging (fMRI). Results showed strong cerebellar activation during order generation for all event types compared to passive viewing or reading events. More importantly, new social events involving true or false beliefs showed stronger activation in the bilateral posterior cerebellum (Crus 1 and Crus 2) compared to routine social and non-social (mechanical) events. This confirms the critical role of the posterior cerebellum in the understanding and construction of the correct order of action sequences relevant for social understanding. The present tasks and results may facilitate diagnoses and treatments of cerebellar dysfunctions in the future.
Highlights
Researchers have made great progress in uncovering the neural correlates of social understanding
Both mentalizing networks are part of a larger default mode network[12,13,14]. These studies documented that the posterior cerebellum is strongly implicated in social mentalizing, and connected to cortical areas known to be involved in social cognition[2,3]
This study investigated whether the posterior cerebellum is involved in action sequencing and whether social mentalizing plays a crucial role in this
Summary
Researchers have made great progress in uncovering the neural correlates of social understanding This advancement, was predominantly focused on the cerebrum and the cortical areas subserving mentalizing, collectively termed the mentalizing network (for reviews see[1,2,3]). Based on resting-state connectivity, Buckner and colleagues[11] identified a distinct mentalizing network in the posterior cerebellum that was directly connected to the mentalizing network in the cerebrum Both mentalizing networks are part of a larger default mode network[12,13,14]. Voluntary motor processes and to allow adjustment of movement during its execution According to these authors, during human evolution, a more advanced function developed which allowed the cerebellum to construct internal models of purely mental processes in which event sequences play a role, without overt movements and somatosensory feedback. Hoche et al found worse performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test[22]
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