Min Qiu

Research

The posterior cerebellar Crus plays a critical role of in social mentalizing. While inferring the mental state of other persons, the posterior cerebellar Crus area (Crus 1 and 2) identifies other people’s (sequences of) actions and builds internal models of these temporal sequences. This mechanism allows to better anticipate upcoming social interactions in an automatic, smooth and intuitive way and to fine-tune these anticipations, making it easier to understand others’ social behaviors and mental states (e.g., beliefs, intentions, traits) which are essential for efficient social interaction. Autism, which is a developmental disorder characterized by difficulties in social interaction, preference for repetition and predictive (social) situations, and a strong reliance on learning social understanding via explicit rules, rather than implicitly via experience. For that, the posterior cerebellum is critical in autism.

This project focus on neurostimulation of the social cerebellum to improve social action sequencing. We will first make published and tested social sequencing tasks more difficult, and then combined tDCS and fMRI to further investigate the behavioral performance and brain activation in mentalizing key areas (posterior cerebellum, precuneus and TPJ…) on healthy and autism participants.

Supervisors

prof. dr. Kris Baetens

prof. dr. Frank van Overwalle