Functional segregation of the human cerebellum in social cognitive tasks revealed by TMS

Introduction. This database includes the raw data linked with the paper “Functional segregation of the human cerebellum in social cognitive tasks revealed by TMS”. In this paper, we reported healthy participants’ mean accuracy rates and reaction times (RTs) during an emotion discrimination task (Experiment 1 and Experiment 2), an evaluation of situated emotion task (Experiment 3) and emotion recognition task (Experiment 4). The present study aimed at investigating the contribution of different regions of the (posterior) cerebellum to the comprehension of others’ emotions.

Methods. In four experiments, we used Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to interfere with the activity of two posterior cerebellar sectors, namely a paravermal and lateral cerebellar regions (and over the vertex as control site), while healthy participants performed an emotion discrimination task (N=24, Experiment 1; N=22, Experiment 2), an evaluation of situated emotion task (N=27, Experiment 3) and an emotion recognition task (N=20, Experiment 4).

Results (in brief). Our data showed that interfering via TMS with the activity of the medial posterior cerebellum affected basic emotion recognition in a two-alternative force-choice task, although this effect was restricted to negative stimuli (i.e., classification of fearful faces and scenarios). In turn, TMS over both the medial and lateral posterior cerebellum affected performance in a same-different discrimination task, requiring indicating whether two faces expressed the same or a different (ambiguous) emotion (anger/happiness or fear/happiness). Finally, only TMS over the lateral posterior cerebellum affected performance in a task requiring a higher-level social inference and in which participants had to recognize an (ambiguous) facial emotion as expressing happiness or fear considering the context in which it was experienced, with this effect being again only evident for fearful faces.