The Role of the Posterior Cerebellum in Dysfunctional Social Sequencing

Cerebellum. 2021 Oct 12. doi: 10.1007/s12311-021-01330-y. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTRecent 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 t...

Source: Cerebellum - October 12, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Frank Van Overwalle Chris Baeken Salvatore Campanella Cleo L Crunelle Elien Heleven Charles Kornreich Maria Leggio Xavier No ël Marie-Anne Vanderhasselt Kris Baetens Source Type: research