**Figure 3.**

*Main cerebellar circuits. The mossy and climbing fibers carry the input information toward the cerebellum. The PC transmit the information to the deep cerebellar nuclei, which are the cerebellar output. The interactions between the cells are represented with (+) in case of excitatory connections and (−) when connections are inhibitory. Modified from [29].*

*The Cerebellum and Autism: More than Motor Control DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.85897*

the existence of strong connections between right Crus I/Crus II and different cortical regions implicated in language, such as Brodmann's area BA46 in the PFC [32]. In fact, dysfunction in cerebellar-prefrontal loops might underlie poorer performance on measures of language-related executive function in human patients with cerebellar abnormalities [33]. The cerebellum also seems to play a role in several social and affective processes. For example, imitation is a critical skill for implicit learning of social rules, and fMRI studies in humans show that during a task that involves observation and imitation of an action performed by a human model, activation of the Crus I/Crus II regions in the posterior cerebellum is increased [34]. Also, during a passive viewing paradigm, a stronger activation in the posterior cerebellum (lobules VI, VII, and X) has been found when comparing social versus nonsocial stimuli [35]. In fact, a recent meta-analysis of over 350 fMRI studies exploring the role of the cerebellum in social cognition supports that it plays a crucial role in several social paradigms such as mirroring (i.e., observation of human motion) and mentalizing (i.e., interpreting other people's thoughts and intentions) [36, 37].
