The Role of the Posterior Cerebellum in Dysfunctional Social Sequencing

Abstract

Recent advances in social neuroscience have highlighted the critical role of the cerebellum in social cognition, and especially the posterior cerebellum. Studies have supported the view that the posterior cerebellum builds internal action models of our social interactions to predict how other people's actions will be executed and what our most likely responses are to these actions. This mechanism allows to better anticipate action sequences during social interactions in an automatic and intuitive way and to fine-tune these anticipations, making it easier to understand other's social behaviors and mental states (e.g., beliefs, intentions, traits). In this paper, we argue that the central role of the posterior cerebellum in identifying and automatizing social action sequencing provides a fruitful starting point for investigating social dysfunctions in a variety of clinical pathologies, such as autism, obsessive-compulsive and bipolar disorder, depression, and addiction. Our key hypothesis is that dysfunctions of the posterior cerebellum lead to under-or overuse of inflexible social routines and lack of plasticity for learning new, more adaptive, social automatisms. We briefly review past research supporting this view and propose a program of research to test our hypothesis. This approach might alleviate a variety of mental problems of individuals who suffer from inflexible automatizations that stand in the way of adjustable and intuitive social behavior, by increasing posterior cerebellar plasticity using noninvasive neurostimulation or neuro-guided training programs.

Explicit and Implicit Emotion Processing in the Cerebellum: A Meta-analysis and Systematic Review

“…Clinical manifestations of this syndrome include cognitive disruptions and personality changes such as increased impulsivity and aggression, inappropriate laughter, or affective blunting [67,75]. Furthermore, the cerebellum is often affected in psychological disorders such as autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, and depression, possibly in relation to its role in social cognition and mentalizing [9,14,40,42,79,81,82]. For example, in patients with depression or bipolar disorder, molecular changes to Purkinje cells and a reduction in cerebellar volume have been associated with clinical diagnosis, and in healthy individuals have been correlated with symptoms of neuroticism [1,47,68].…”

Impaired sequence generation: a preliminary comparison between high functioning autistic and neurotypical adults

“…These tasks recruit the posterior cerebellum (Heleven et al, 2019 ) and require the understanding of high-level social true and false beliefs, social routines, and nonsocial mechanical functionality. We hypothesized that sequence generation would be impaired in autistic adults since sequential information processing is related to the cerebellum (Leggio and Molinari, 2015 ), and in particular social sequencing since ASD is associated with dysfunctionality in the posterior cerebellum involved in social mentalizing (D’Mello et al, 2015 ; Olivito et al, 2018 ; Velikonja et al, 2019 ; Van Overwalle et al, 2021 ).…”

A narrative sequencing and mentalizing training for adults with autism: A pilot study

“…According to the sequence detection hypothesis (Leggio and Molinari, 2015), the cerebellum functions by identifying temporal sequences in human behavior, automatizing them after repeated exposure leading to smooth behavior, and sending feedback signals to the neocortex when unexpected violations of these sequences occur. A similar cerebellar sequencing function has been suggested for social mentalizing (Van Overwalle et al, 2014, 2019aHeleven et al, 2019). For example, to recognize a sarcastic remark, one needs to remember the relevant contextual information based on automatized event schemas, recognize a sudden, unexpected change in body language and in intonation, and evaluate verbal comments as reflecting inappropriate judgments of people, exaggerated statements, or non-literal statements.…”

“…The design of the training program was based on recent neuroscientific insights on sequencing functions of the posterior cerebellum implicated in many non-motor behaviors such as language (De Smet et al, 2007;Mariën et al, 2014) and social cognition, including autobiographic memory and the chronological order of social events (Van Overwalle et al, 2014, 2019aHeleven et al, 2021). Structural and functional deficits in the posterior cerebellum are responsible for most of the social and communicative difficulties observed in autism Hampson and Blatt, 2015).…”

“…These autobiographical memories are reduced and less specific in autistic adults (Hare et al, 2007;Lind and Bowler, 2010;McDonnell et al, 2017;Anger et al, 2019). Research has furthermore shown a strong overlap between neural systems for mentalizing and for autobiographical memory, as they are all part of the default mode network in the neocortex and cerebellum (Andrews-Hanna et al, 2014;Van Overwalle et al, 2014).…”