THE SOCIAL CEREBELLUM: A FORWARD CONTROLLER OF HUMAN INTERACTIONS?

The capacity to understand another person’s intentions, beliefs and personality traits, based on observed or communicated behaviors, is termed social mentalizing. During the last decade, social neuroscience has made great progress in understanding the neural correlates of social mentalizing. However, since the cerebellum has long been considered only as a sensorimotor coordinator, the contribution of this major part of the brain in social processing has been largely ignored and its specific role in social mentalizing remains unclear. Nevertheless, recent meta-analyses have shown a crucial involvement of the cerebellum in social mentalizing. This raises the question: What is the exact function of the cerebellum in social mentalizing? The aim of the present project is to test the hypothesis of the cerebellum as a “forward controller” of action sequences. That is, the well-known role of the cerebellum as a forward controller for guiding one’s own motions and actions is
extended to the understanding of actions by other people. We hypothesize that the cerebellum builds internal action models to predict how other people’s actions will be executed, so that we can automatize our social understanding and easily predict the action sequences performed by others.