Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA.
Department of Neurology,Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63108, USA.
Cereb Cortex. 2022 Feb 19;32(5):987-1003. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhab260.
The cerebellum has been traditionally disregarded in relation to nonmotor functions, but recent findings indicate it may be involved in language, affective processing, and social functions. Mentalizing, or Theory of Mind (ToM), is the ability to infer mental states of others and this skill relies on a distributed network of brain regions. Here, we leveraged large-scale multimodal neuroimaging data to elucidate the structural and functional role of the cerebellum in mentalizing. We used functional activations to determine whether the cerebellum has a domain-general or domain-specific functional role, and effective connectivity and probabilistic tractography to map the cerebello-cerebral mentalizing network. We found that the cerebellum is organized in a domain-specific way and that there is a left cerebellar effective and structural lateralization, with more and stronger effective connections from the left cerebellar hemisphere to the right cerebral mentalizing areas, and greater cerebello-thalamo-cortical and cortico-ponto-cerebellar streamline counts from and to the left cerebellum. Our study provides novel insights to the network organization of the cerebellum, an overlooked brain structure, and mentalizing, one of humans' most essential abilities to navigate the social world.
小脑在传统上与非运动功能无关，但最近的发现表明它可能与语言、情感处理和社交功能有关。心理理论（Theory of Mind，ToM）是推断他人心理状态的能力，而这种技能依赖于大脑区域的分布式网络。在这里，我们利用大规模多模态神经影像学数据来阐明小脑在心理理论中的结构和功能作用。我们使用功能激活来确定小脑是否具有一般领域或特定领域的功能作用，以及使用有效连通性和概率轨迹追踪来绘制小脑-大脑心理理论网络。我们发现小脑是按照特定的领域组织的，并且存在左侧小脑的有效和结构侧化，即左侧小脑与右侧大脑心理理论区域之间存在更多和更强的有效连接，以及从左侧小脑到左侧小脑的小脑-丘脑-皮质和皮质-桥脑-小脑的流线计数更多更强。我们的研究为小脑的网络组织提供了新的见解，小脑是一个被忽视的大脑结构，而心理理论是人类在社交世界中导航的最基本能力之一。
