The role of the cerebellum in reconstructing social action sequences: a pilot study

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.

Functional Changes of Mentalizing Network in SCA2 Patients: Novel Insights into Understanding the Social Cerebellum

“…On the other hand, most standard social cognition tests cannot detect social impairments in cerebellar cohorts because cerebellar patients' symptoms are present in selective domains. In this view, the implementation of specific tasks involving complex and abstract forms of mentalizing [66] will help to detect such a relation in greater patients population. Another issue that merits to be discussed concerns with the possible cortical involvement in symptomatic SCA2 patients.…”

Consensus Paper: Cerebellum and Social Cognition

“…To provide further support for cerebellar specificity in generating appropriate social action sequences, Van Overwalle and colleagues [ 3 ] described impaired abilities in patients affected by cerebellar degenerative disease when performing a sequential version of a false belief task [ 76 ]. Taking into account this evidence, it can be conceptualized that the cerebellum is a unique predictive structure in different domains.…”

“…These reports focused on the understanding of affect in facial expressions of others [ 1 ] without much attention to higher-level mental states of others. However, a novel collaboration between researchers from the field of social neuroscience (Frank Van Overwalle) and the cerebellum (Peter Marien and Mario Manto) resulted in the discovery of the important social function of the cerebellum [ 2 , 3 ] which instigated novel research on the potential role of the cerebellum in social cognition. Social cognitive processes encompass social “mentalizing” (or mind reading) which depends on the inferred unobserved mental state of other people as well as social “mirroring” (or body reading) which depends on the observed goal-directed body movement of others.…”

The Cerebellar Cognitive Affective/Schmahmann Syndrome: a Task Force Paper

“…With respect to understanding social behavior, several studies reported that CB patients have impairments in identifying or generating a plausible sequence of pictures reflecting a complex action performed by a human agent [111,112]. Patients were particularly impaired when correct sequencing required mentalizing about the agents' beliefs, but not so for routine social scripts [113]. Likewise, Zalla and colleagues [114,115] found that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were impaired in predicting the outcome or sequence of human behavior, but were less impaired in understanding routine social interactions.…”