Cerebellum may set the stage for development of mental empathy in early childhood

We can’t see what other people are thinking, so we have to infer it and that’s very crucial for our communication as humans. That’s how we create shared meaning and that’s how we choose our words to be understood, a kind of mental empathy.

A pivotal milestone in the development of Theory of Mind reasoning occurs between the ages of 3 and 5 years, a breakthrough period in which children typically start succeeding in false-belief tasks, widely regarded as a critical test of Theory of Mind abilities. These tasks require children to recognize false beliefs held by a story character, typically in the context of the character’s mental misrepresentations regarding an object’s location, content, or nature. Successfully passing false-belief tasks is argued to reflect the emergence of representations of others’ mental states.

To find out more about this critical period where social cognition evolves, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences used collected data from 41 children between 3 and 12 years old.

“We first aimed to identify clusters that are generally activated during Theory of Mind processing in the developing cerebellum, regardless of children’s Theory of Mind abilities. The children watched movies in an MRI scanner while their brain activity was recorded. This test with movie scenes revealed significant involvement of the cerebellum, a brain region mostly known for motor functions but lately also language and cognition,” explains Aikaterina Manoli, first author of the study published in Nature Communications.

According to her and colleagues, pediatric evidence indicates that early-life cerebellar injury often results in severe and persistent changes in social behavior, frequently observed in the context of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders such as autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia.

“We know from lesion studies that when you get an injury in the cerebellum early in life, it is much harder to recover from it than when you get it as an adult. What we found is that the cerebellum gives more information to the cerebral cortex in children, whereas in adults, the cerebral cortex gives more information to the cerebellum. So there is like an inverse loop going on. We therefore think that the cerebellum is setting up the stage for cortical processes to emerge in childhood,” says Manoli.

“Our findings suggest a significant association between early-life changes in the cerebellum and Theory of Mind development, insofar as the cerebellum stores information that supports the subsequent prediction of mental states,” says Sofie Valk, who shares the last authorship with Charlotte Grosse Wiesmann. “Our results also align with evidence suggesting that the socio-cognitive deficits of autism spectrum disorder are associated with functional and structural abnormalities of the cerebellum.

“It would be interesting to explore the function of cerebellar activations in younger children and infants. Even though verbal false-belief Theory of Mind reasoning only emerges between 3 and 5 years of age, in non-verbal tasks, infants younger than 2 years old already seem to consider others’ mental states.

“Future studies should assess the extent to which different brain regions relate to the non-verbal abilities observed in infants.”