The cerebellum is primarily responsible for the coordination and fine -tuning of our movements. But apparently it also plays an important role in the development of the empathy of children, as a study using MRI recordings shows. In children who can already successfully put themselves in others, similar areas are active in the cerebellum as in adults. However, unlike adults, her cerebellum sends more information to the cerebrum than the other way around. The results also provide evidence of why cerebellar damage in childhood is often associated with disorders of social development such as autism.
At the age of around three to five years, children learn to put themselves in other people. This so -called theory of mind forms the basis for compassion and includes, among other things, the ability to recognize and understand the feelings, intentions and beliefs of others. In typical tests of the Theory of Mind, children are confronted with fairy tale figures who assume false basic assumptions and therefore, for example, do not look for a hidden object in the right place. If children successfully identify such false beliefs, this is a sign that they can understand the perspective and mental states of others.
Short film in the MRI
A team led by Aikaterina Manoli from the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Neurosciences in Leipzig has now investigated what role the cerebellum plays in this development step. For this purpose, the researchers used publicly available MRI data from 41 children aged three to twelve years from an earlier study. For this investigation, the children had seen the Pixar short film “Partly Wolkig” during the MRI scan, which put the empathy in various places. The main character expresses its intentions several times and is also bitten by a crocodile.
Manoli and her team focused on what exactly happened during these film sequences in the children’s cerebellum. In fact, the activity in several regions of the child’s cerebellum increased when the main character suffered pain or spoke about its projects. There were clear differences between children who have already developed a theory of mind, and children who still have this development step ahead of them. In children who already had this ability to take over the perspective, additional areas were active in the cerebellum, which were also better networked with the cerebrum.
Information from the cerebellum
In addition, the researchers compared the cerebellar activity of the children with that of adults. The result: “In children who have passed a theory of Mind test, similar areas in the cerebellum are active as in adults during the film view,” reports the team. In addition, they showed similarly pronounced connections between Kleinerbrairn and Großbrank. But in the direction of these connections, Manoli and her colleagues came up with a significant difference: “We found that the cerebellum in children passes on more information to the cerebral cortex in children, while in adults the cerebral cortex passes more information on the cerebellum,” reports Manoli. “We therefore think that the cerebellum creates the prerequisites for the development of cortical processes in childhood.”
From the researcher’s point of view, this finding could explain why early childhood injuries to the cerebellum are often associated with disorders of social development. “Our results coincide with references that the socio-cognitive deficits of autism spectrum disorders are connected to functional and structural anomalies of the cerebellum,” says Manoli’s colleague Sofie Valk. “It would be interesting to examine the function of cerebellar activation in younger children and infants.”
Source: Aikaterina Manoli (Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Neurosciences, Leipzig) et al., Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/S41467-025-60523-9
