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      Social cognition and the cerebellum: a meta-analysis of over 350 fMRI studies.

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          Abstract

          This meta-analysis explores the role of the cerebellum in social cognition. Recent meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies since 2008 demonstrate that the cerebellum is only marginally involved in social cognition and emotionality, with a few meta-analyses pointing to an involvement of at most 54% of the individual studies. In this study, novel meta-analyses of over 350 fMRI studies, dividing up the domain of social cognition in homogeneous subdomains, confirmed this low involvement of the cerebellum in conditions that trigger the mirror network (e.g., when familiar movements of body parts are observed) and the mentalizing network (when no moving body parts or unfamiliar movements are present). There is, however, one set of mentalizing conditions that strongly involve the cerebellum in 50-100% of the individual studies. In particular, when the level of abstraction is high, such as when behaviors are described in terms of traits or permanent characteristics, in terms of groups rather than individuals, in terms of the past (episodic autobiographic memory) or the future rather than the present, or in terms of hypothetical events that may happen. An activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis conducted in this study reveals that the cerebellum is critically implicated in social cognition and that the areas of the cerebellum which are consistently involved in social cognitive processes show extensive overlap with the areas involved in sensorimotor (during mirror and self-judgments tasks) as well as in executive functioning (across all tasks). We discuss the role of the cerebellum in social cognition in general and in higher abstraction mentalizing in particular. We also point out a number of methodological limitations of some available studies on the social brain that hamper the detection of cerebellar activity.

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          Author and article information

          Journal
          Neuroimage
          NeuroImage
          Elsevier BV
          1095-9572
          1053-8119
          Feb 01 2014
          : 86
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium. Electronic address: Frank.VanOverwalle@vub.ac.be.
          [2 ] Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium.
          [3 ] Faculty of Arts, Department of Clinical and Experimental Neurolinguistics, CLIN, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium; Department of Neurology and Memory Clinic, ZNA Middelheim Hospital, Lindendreef 1, B-2020 Antwerp, Belgium.
          Article
          S1053-8119(13)00969-5
          10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.09.033
          24076206
          4d1b7cb4-535a-41b3-ab23-d46b89b6b72d
          © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
          History

          Cerebellum,Functional neuroimaging,Meta-analysis,Review,Social cognition

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