Abstract
Recent research has revealed that the cerebellum plays a critical role in social reasoning and in particular in understanding false beliefs and making trait attributions. One hypothesis is that the cerebellum is responsible for the understanding of sequences of motions and actions, which may be a prerequisite for social understanding. To investigate the role of action sequencing in mentalizing, we tested patients with generalized cerebellar degenerative lesions on tests of social understanding and compared their performance with matched healthy volunteers. The tests involved understanding violations of social norms making trait and causal attributions on the basis of short behavioral sentences and generating the correct chronological order of social actions depicted in cartoons (picture sequencing task). Cerebellar patients showed clear deficits only on the picture sequencing task when generating the correct order of cartoons depicting false belief stories and showed at or close to normal performance for mechanical stories and overlearned social scripts. In addition, they performed marginally worse on trait attributions inferred from verbal behavioral descriptions. We conclude that inferring the mental state of others through understanding the correct sequences of their actions requires the support of the cerebellum.
Highlights
When maneuvering through the social environment, it is crucial to understand the mind of other persons
In a largescale meta-analysis on social cognition and the cerebellum that included over 350 functional magnetic resonance imaging studies with healthy humans, Van Overwalle et al (2014) found robust activation of the cerebellum during social judgments, including mentalizing about others’ intentions and beliefs, personality traits and mental time travel in the past and future
Research revealed that there is a strong neural interaction between the cerebellum and cerebrum during social mentalizing, as revealed by a recent meta-analytic connectivity study on social cognition (Van Overwalle et al, 2015b) as well as a connectivity study pooled across five functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies (Van Overwalle and Mariën, 2016; Van Overwalle et al, 2019)
Summary
When maneuvering through the social environment, it is crucial to understand the mind of other persons. In a largescale meta-analysis on social cognition and the cerebellum that included over 350 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies with healthy humans, Van Overwalle et al (2014) found robust activation of the cerebellum during social judgments, including mentalizing about others’ intentions and beliefs, personality traits and mental time travel in the past and future. With respect to social cognition, the sequencing role of the cerebellum is perhaps most evident and prominent in mental reconstructions of past and future events and in highlevel trait inferences based on integrating behavioral events. These social judgments recruit the cerebellum most strongly (see meta-analysis by Van Overwalle et al, 2014). Hoche et al (2016) found worse performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test (Baron-Cohen et al, 2001)
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