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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Sep 4, 2025

Modeling the Functional Network for Spatial Navigation in the Human Brain

Modeling the Functional Network for Spatial Navigation in the Human Brain

Published on: October 13, 2023

Mind your step: social cerebellum in interactive navigation.

Meijia Li¹, Min Pu¹, Kris Baetens^1,2

¹Faculty of Psychology and Center for Neuroscience, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels 1050 , Belgium.

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

|July 22, 2022

Summary

The cerebellum signals social expectation violations during navigation tasks. Inconsistent social actions activate the posterior cerebellum, while non-social inconsistencies recruit other cerebellar regions.

Keywords:

expectation violation goal-directed behavior mentalizing posterior cerebellum predictive brain social interaction social navigation social sequence learning

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Science
Social Cognition

Background:

The posterior cerebellum is implicated in social cognition and predicting sequential events.
The role of the cerebellum in processing violations of social expectations during real-time interactions is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate cerebellar activation patterns in response to violated social expectations within a sequential navigation task.
To differentiate cerebellar responses to social versus non-social expectation violations.

Main Methods:

A social navigation paradigm involving a protagonist giving a gift was used, with a non-social control task involving object assembly.
Participants memorized and reproduced action sequences, with some sequences containing unexpected outcomes.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was employed to measure brain activity.

Main Results:

Violations of social expectations during navigation activated the posterior cerebellum (Crus 1/2) and cortical mentalizing regions.
Non-social expectation violations primarily recruited cerebellar lobules IV-V and the action observation network.
Cerebellar responses differed significantly between social and non-social sequencing tasks.

Conclusions:

The posterior cerebellum plays a crucial role in detecting and signaling inconsistencies in social outcomes during goal-directed navigation.
Cerebellar function in social cognition extends to processing violations of learned social sequences.
Distinct cerebellar regions are involved in processing social versus non-social sequential information.