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. 2019 May 31;14(5):549-558.
doi: 10.1093/scan/nsz032.

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

Frank Van Overwalle  1 , Sarah De Coninck  1   2 , Elien Heleven  1 , Gaetano Perrotta  3 , Nordeyn Oulad Ben Taib  4 , Mario Manto  5 , Peter Mariën  1
Affiliations

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

Frank Van Overwalle et al. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. .

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.

Keywords: cerebellum; social mentalizing; theory of mind.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
An example of a false-belief sequence in the picture sequencing task (Langdon and Coltheart, 1999; the correct order is 2–1–4–3; the numbers are not shown to the participants but given here for display purposes). Participants had to select, in the correct order, the first picture on the screen, then the second picture and so on. Each time, the pictures moved in the order indicated by the participant.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Comparison of degenerative cerebellar patients in comparison with healthy controls on the picture sequencing and attribution tasks. Error bars reflect standard errors. °P < 0.10, ***P < 0.002 (one-sided t-test). Numbers of participants are reported in Table 3.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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