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.

中文翻译：

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社会小脑：功能和结构特异性及连通性的大规模研究


传统上，小脑与非运动功能的关系被忽视，但最近的研究结果表明，它可能与语言、情感处理和社会功能有关。心智化或心智理论 (ToM) 是推断他人心理状态的能力，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数据来阐明小脑在心理化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通用域或特定域的功能角色，并使用有效的连接和概率纤维束描记来绘制小脑-大脑心智化网络。我们发现小脑以特定领域的方式组织，并且存在左侧小脑有效和结构偏侧化，从左侧小脑半球到右侧大脑心智化区域以及更大的小脑-丘脑-皮质有更多更强的有效连接皮质-脑桥-小脑流线从左小脑开始计数并流向左小脑。我们的研究为小脑的网络组织（一种被忽视的大脑结构）和心智化（人类驾驭社交世界最重要的能力之一）提供了新颖的见解。