Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium.
Universiteit Hasselt, Hasselt, Belgium.
Sci Rep. 2019 Jul 31;9(1):11110. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-46962-7.
Social neuroscience largely ignored the role of the cerebellum, despite its implications in a broad range of tasks and neurological disorders related to social functioning and inferences on others' mental state such as beliefs. One hypothesis states that during human evolution, the cerebellum's function evolved from a mere coordinator of fluent sequences of motions and actions, to an interpreter of action sequences without overt movements that are important for social understanding. The present study introduces new tasks to investigate the role of the cerebellum in sequencing, in which participants generated the correct chronological order of new or well-known event stories with or without social elements during functional neuroimaging (fMRI). Results showed strong cerebellar activation during order generation for all event types compared to passive viewing or reading events. More importantly, new social events involving true or false beliefs showed stronger activation in the bilateral posterior cerebellum (Crus 1 and Crus 2) compared to routine social and non-social (mechanical) events. This confirms the critical role of the posterior cerebellum in the understanding and construction of the correct order of action sequences relevant for social understanding. The present tasks and results may facilitate diagnoses and treatments of cerebellar dysfunctions in the future.
社会神经科学在很大程度上忽略了小脑的作用，尽管它与广泛的任务和与社交功能相关的神经紊乱有关，并且可以对他人的心理状态（如信念）进行推断。有一种假设认为，在人类进化过程中，小脑的功能从一个仅仅协调流畅的运动和动作序列的器官，演变成了一个解释没有明显运动的动作序列的器官，而这些动作序列对于社交理解非常重要。本研究引入了新的任务来研究小脑在序列生成中的作用，在功能神经影像学（fMRI）期间，参与者生成新的或熟知的事件故事的正确时间顺序，这些故事有或没有社会元素。结果表明，与被动观看或阅读事件相比，所有事件类型的顺序生成都表现出强烈的小脑激活。更重要的是，与常规的社会和非社会（机械）事件相比，涉及真实或虚假信念的新社会事件在双侧小脑后部（1 号和 2 号小脑脚）表现出更强的激活。这证实了小脑后部在理解和构建与社交理解相关的正确动作序列顺序方面的关键作用。本研究中的任务和结果可能有助于未来对小脑功能障碍的诊断和治疗。
