The posterior cerebellum and inconsistent trait implications when learning the sequence of actions

Abstract

It has been proposed that the cerebellum contributes to social cognition. Based on the view that cerebellar internal models create predictions on motions and actions, we hypothesize that the posterior cerebellum supports identifying temporal sequences of persons’ actions as well as detecting inconsistent actions that violate the implied trait. Participants were required to memorize the temporal order of a set of sentences that implied a personality trait. Importantly, the sentence sets were designed in such a way that the first half of each set involved actions that were consistent with the same trait, while the other half was either consistent or inconsistent with that trait. As expected, we found robust posterior cerebellar activation when memorizing the order of the actions, irrespective of trait consistency, but more crucially also for actions implying an inconsistent trait in comparison to consistent trait actions. We also found that the mPFC and posterior cerebellum were associated with confidence level in retrieving the sequences. This study supports the hypothesis that the posterior cerebellum identifies and predicts the low-level temporal order of actions, and demonstrates for the first time that this area is also involved in the high-level prediction of trait implications of those actions.

The posterior cerebellum and temporoparietal junction support explicit learning of social belief sequences

“…Another recent meta-analysis found that a great majority (74%) of approximately 200 studies with activation in the posterior cerebellar Crus II revealed task processes involving mentalizing or self-related emotion attribution (Van Overwalle, Ma, & Heleven, 2020a). Recent fMRI studies further indicated that the posterior cerebellum was highly activated when social tasks required the generation of social action sequences, such as giving the correct chorological order of stories involving beliefs (Heleven et al, 2019), memorizing the order of actions implying traits of other people (Pu et al, 2020;Pu et al, 2021), or predicting sequential actions of persons based on their traits (Haihambo et al, 2021). Together, these studies suggest that the posterior cerebellum, especially Crus I and II, plays a critical role in identifying the sequence of social actions while inferring the mental state of other persons and may aid in anticipating and inferring others' mental states during dynamic interaction.…”

The Involvement of the Posterior Cerebellum in Reconstructing and Predicting Social Action Sequences

“…• In one study, we explored to what extent the posterior cerebellar Crus might be sensitive to deviations from previously acquired knowledge, not only in sequences, but also in higher level social information caused by inconsistencies revealed by social mentalizing, such as inconsistencies in trait implications revealed by inconsistent actions in a person's actions. To investigate this, Pu et al [42] slightly modified the previous study by Pu et al [37]. As in that study, participants were required to memorize the given temporal order of a series of social actions of a protagonist that implied a personality trait.…”

“…C Implicit belief serial response time [36]. D Trait-inconsistent action sequences [42]. E Trait-based action prediction [43] • Besides observing actions of others here and now, we also tested the hypothesis that the cerebellum might be a coprocessor in the service of predictive coding [23] supporting the prediction of future actions.…”

“…Specifically, we investigated how information about a person's mental state (e.g., trait) might help to predict his or her future action sequences. Haihambo et al [43] explored this question by reversing the task logic of the inconsistent trait study by Pu et al [42] described above. In this novel study, participants were first given the trait of a protagonist (e.g., Fumak is dishonest), and then they had to select four out of six possible actions that were consistent with the trait information and them in the correct chronological order (Fig.…”

Evidence of the role of the cerebellum in cognitive theory of mind using voxel-based lesion mapping

“…Nevertheless, understanding the direct role of the cerebellum in ToM remains challenging. A handful of imaging studies with healthy participants demonstrated cerebellar activation when performing a mentalizing task 17 – 21 . Yet, only a small portion of the studies reported cerebellar activation during social judgments, including mentalizing 13 , 22 .…”