It has been proposed that impairments of the predictive function exerted by the cerebellum may account for social cognition deficits. Here, we integrated cerebellar functions in a predictive coding framework to elucidate how congenital, non-progressive cerebellar alterations could affect the predictive processing of others' behavior. Experiment 1 demonstrated that cerebellar patients were impaired in relying on contextual information during prediction of other persons' movement, and this impairment was significantly associated with social cognition abilities. Experiment 2 indicated that children and adolescents with congenital, non-progressive cerebellar malformation showed a domain-general deficit in using contextual information to predict both others' movements and physical events, and that this impairment was independent from patients' cognitive abilities. Experiment 3 provided first evidence that a social-prediction training in virtual reality could boost the ability to use context-based predictions to understand others’ intentions. These findings shed new light on the predictive role of the cerebellum and its contribution to social cognition, paving the way for new approaches to the rehabilitation of the Cerebellar Cognitive Affective Syndrome.

有人提出，小脑发挥的预测功能受损可能是社会认知缺陷的原因。在这里，我们将小脑功能整合到预测编码框架中，以阐明先天性、非进行性小脑改变如何影响他人行为的预测处理。实验 1 表明，小脑患者在预测他人运动过程中依赖上下文信息的能力受损，这种损伤与社会认知能力显着相关。实验 2 表明，患有先天性非进行性小脑畸形的儿童和青少年在使用上下文信息来预测他人的运动和身体事件方面表现出普遍缺陷，并且这种损害与患者的认知能力无关。实验 3 提供了第一个证据，表明虚拟现实中的社交预测训练可以提高使用基于上下文的预测来理解他人意图的能力。这些发现揭示了小脑的预测作用及其对社会认知的贡献，为小脑认知情感综合征的康复新方法铺平了道路。