The causal contribution of the cerebellar hemispheres in social mentalizing

Introduction This database includes the raw data linked with the paper “The causal contribution of the cerebellar hemispheres in social mentalizing ” submitted to the NeuroImage journal. In this paper, we reported behavioral data of healthy adults receiving TMS over the cerebellum during a mentalizing task. Methods Fifty healthy adults received transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) while performing the Yoni task, a well-established measure of mentalizing, with the aim to provide causal evidence for the involvement of the cerebellar hemispheres in reasoning about others’ minds and to determine whether this contribution is specific to mentalizing or reflects domain-general cognitive processes engaged during (but nor specific of) social reasoning. Results (in brief) We found that TMS applied to both the left and right posterior cerebellar hemispheres impaired performance both when participants reasoned about Yoni’s mental states (mentalizing condition) and when reasoning about its physical characteristics (control condition), indicating a domain-general contribution of these regions to cognitive processes involved in social reasoning. Crucially, stimulation of the right cerebellar hemisphere produced a significantly greater impairment than stimulation of the left hemisphere during the mentalizing condition, whereas no hemispheric differences emerged in the control condition.