Exciting the social butterfly: Anodal cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation modulates neural activation during predictive social mentalizing

Abstract

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) has emerged as a promising tool for enhancing social cognition. The posterior cerebellum, which is part of the mentalizing network, has been implicated in social processes. In our combined tDCS-fMRI study, we investigated the effects of offline anodal cerebellar tDCS on activation in the cerebellum during social action prediction. Forty-one participants were randomly assigned to receive either anodal (2 mA) or sham (0 mA) stimulation over the midline of the posterior cerebellum for 20 min. Twenty minutes post stimulation, participants underwent a functional MRI scan to complete a social action prediction task, during which they had to correctly order randomly presented sentences that described either actions of social agents (based on their personality traits) or events of objects (based on their characteristics). As hypothesized, our results revealed that participants who received anodal cerebellar tDCS exhibited increased activation in the posterior cerebellar Crus 2 and lobule IX, and in key cerebral mentalizing areas, including the medial prefrontal cortex, temporo-parietal junction, and precuneus. Contrary to our hypotheses, participants who received anodal stimulation demonstrated faster responses to non-social objects compared to social agents, while sham participants showed no significant differences. We did not find a significant relationship between electric field magnitude, neural activation and behavioral outcomes. These findings suggest that tDCS targeting the posterior cerebellum selectively enhances activation in social mentalizing areas, while only facilitating behavioral performance of non-social material, perhaps because of a ceiling effect due to familiarity with social processing.