Clausi Silvia, Olivito Giusy, Lupo Michela, Siciliano Libera, Bozzali Marco, Leggio Maria
Ataxia Laboratory, IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Rome, Italy.
Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy.
Front Cell Neurosci. 2019 Jan 8;12:510. doi: 10.3389/fncel.2018.00510. eCollection 2018.
Recent studies have focused on the role of the cerebellum in the social domain, including in Theory of Mind (ToM). ToM, or the "mentalizing" process, is the ability to attribute mental states, such as emotion, intentions and beliefs, to others to explain and predict their behavior. It is a fundamental aspect of social cognition and crucial for social interactions, together with more automatic mechanisms, such as emotion contagion. Social cognition requires complex interactions between limbic, associative areas and subcortical structures, including the cerebellum. It has been hypothesized that the typical cerebellar role in adaptive control and predictive coding could also be extended to social behavior. The present study aimed to investigate the social cognition abilities of patients with degenerative cerebellar atrophy to understand whether the cerebellum acts in specific ToM components playing a role as predictive structure. To this aim, an social cognition battery was administered to 27 patients with degenerative cerebellar pathology and 27 healthy controls. In addition, 3D T1-weighted and resting-state fMRI scans were collected to characterize the structural and functional changes in cerebello-cortical loops. The results evidenced that the patients were impaired in lower-level processes of immediate perception as well as in the more complex conceptual level of mentalization. Furthermore, they presented a pattern of GM reduction in cerebellar portions that are involved in the social domain such as crus I-II, lobule IX and lobule VIIIa. These areas showed decreased functional connectivity with projection cerebral areas involved in specific aspects of social cognition. These findings boost the idea that the cerebellar modulatory function on the cortical projection areas subtends the social cognition process at different levels. Particularly, regarding the lower-level processes, the cerebellum may act by implicitly matching the external information (i.e., expression of the eyes) with the respective internal representation to guarantee an immediate judgment about the mental state of others. Otherwise, at a more complex conceptual level, the cerebellum seems to be involved in the construction of internal models of mental processes during social interactions in which the prediction of sequential events plays a role, allowing us to anticipate the other person's behavior.
最近的研究聚焦于小脑在社会领域的作用，包括心理理论（ToM）方面。心理理论，即“心理化”过程，是一种将诸如情感、意图和信念等心理状态赋予他人以解释和预测其行为的能力。它是社会认知的一个基本方面，对于社会互动至关重要，与诸如情绪感染等更自动的机制共同作用。社会认知需要边缘系统、联合区域和包括小脑在内的皮层下结构之间进行复杂的相互作用。据推测，小脑在适应性控制和预测编码中的典型作用也可能扩展到社会行为。本研究旨在调查退行性小脑萎缩患者的社会认知能力，以了解小脑是否在特定的心理理论成分中发挥作用，作为一种预测结构。为此，对27名患有退行性小脑病变的患者和27名健康对照者进行了社会认知测试。此外，还收集了三维T1加权和静息态功能磁共振成像扫描，以表征小脑 - 皮层环路的结构和功能变化。结果表明，患者在即时感知的较低层次过程以及心理化的更复杂概念层次上均受损。此外，他们在小脑参与社会领域的部分区域，如小脑脚I - II、小叶IX和小叶VIIIa，呈现出灰质减少的模式。这些区域与参与社会认知特定方面的投射脑区的功能连接减少。这些发现支持了这样一种观点，即小脑对皮层投射区域的调节功能在不同层次上支撑着社会认知过程。特别是，在较低层次的过程中，小脑可能通过将外部信息（即眼睛的表情）与相应的内部表征进行隐性匹配来发挥作用，以保证对他人心理状态的即时判断。否则，在更复杂的概念层次上，小脑似乎参与了社会互动中心理过程内部模型的构建，其中顺序事件的预测发挥作用，使我们能够预测他人的行为。
