The Social Cerebellum: A Large-Scale Investigation of Functional and Structural Specificity and Connectivity
- 25 August 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in Cerebral Cortex
- Vol. 32 (5), 987-1003
- https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhab260
Abstract
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.Keywords
Funding Information
- National Institutes of Health (R01 MH091113, R21 HD098509, R01 HD099165, 2R56MH091113-11)
- Temple University dissertation completion
- Human Connectome Project (1U54MH091657)
- NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research
- McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (32000782)
- National Science Foundation (1625061)
- US Army Research Laboratory (W911NF-16-2-0189)
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