A growing literature points to a specific role of the cerebellum in affect processing. However, understanding of affect processing disturbances following discrete cerebellar lesions is limited. We administered the Tübingen Affect Battery to assess recognition of emotional facial expression and emotional prosody in 15 patients with a cerebellar infarction and 10 age-matched controls. On emotional facial expression tasks, patients compared to controls showed impaired selection and matching of facial affect. On prosody tasks, patients showed marked impairments in naming affect and discriminating incongruencies. These deficits were more pronounced for negative affects. Our results confirm a significant role of the cerebellum in processing emotional recognition, a component of social cognition.
Previous studies investigated the effects of crossmodal spatial attention by comparing the responses to validly versus invalidly cued target stimuli. Dynamics of cortical rhythms in the time interval between cue and target might contribute to cue effects on performance. Here, we studied the influence of spatial attention on ongoing oscillatory brain activity in the interval between cue and target onset. In a first experiment, subjects underwent periods of tactile stimulation (cue) followed by visual stimulation (target) in a spatial cueing task as well as tactile stimulation as a control. In a second experiment, cue validity was modified to be 50%, 75%, or else 25%, to separate effects of exogenous shifts of attention caused by tactile stimuli from that of endogenous shifts. Tactile stimuli produced: 1) a stronger lateralization of the sensorimotor beta-rhythm rebound (15–22 Hz) after tactile stimuli serving as cues versus not serving as cues; 2) a suppression of the occipital alpha-rhythm (7–13 Hz) appearing only in the cueing task (this suppression was stronger contralateral to the endogenously attended side and was predictive of behavioral success); 3) an increase of prefrontal gamma-activity (25–35 Hz) specifically in the cueing task. We measured cue-related modulations of cortical rhythms which may accompany crossmodal spatial attention, expectation or decision, and therefore contribute to cue validity effects. The clearly lateralized alpha suppression after tactile cues in our data indicates its dependence on endogenous rather than exogenous shifts of visuo-spatial attention following a cue independent of its modality.
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