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.

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Inappropriate indoor environmental quality (IEQ) conditions are shown to reduce occupants’ satisfaction, wellbeing and performance. Therefore, it is crucial to provide an excellent classroom IEQ in order to minimize learning loss among students. This study determines the effect of different thermal and indoor air quality (IAQ) conditions in a classroom on students’ satisfaction, study engagement and cognitive performance. Three data collection campaigns were performed in a university classroom. Data collection consisted of (1) continuous IEQ monitoring (i.e., temperature, relative humidity, CO2, …), (2) frequent assessments of students’ satisfaction with IEQ and study engagement via here-and-now surveys, and (3) evaluations of students’ memory and processing speed. The IEQ conditions were varied by adapting (1) a room temperature setpoint between 18°C to 26°C and (2) a CO2-setpoint between 500 ppm and 1000 ppm. A mixed-effects regression analysis on the collected data showed statistically significant relationships between students’ study engagement and the room temperature trend, air enthalpy, relative humidity and TVOC-concentrations in the classroom. The addition of data on students’ satisfaction with IEQ only improved a minority of model fits. A statistically significant difference in students’ memory was found between test conditions. However, a randomized experimental design is needed to determine the relationship between the classroom IEQ and students’ cognitive performance.