Three parsimonious spatiotemporal patterns in cerebellum reveal individual traits in function and behavior

The cerebellum plays a critical role in large-scale brain functional connectivity structure and synchronizing global waves propagation. Despite extensive studies on cortical spatiotemporal architecture, particularly in zero-lag and time-lag synchrony, leaving the parsimonious cerebellar representational structure largely overlooked. Using complex principal component analysis (CPCA) on resting-state fMRI data from the Human Connectome Project, we delineate three dominant low-dimensional spatiotemporal patterns within the cerebellum, manifesting as unimodal-to-transmodal progression, functional antagonism, and hemispheric asymmetry. These patterns correlate with various empirical functional connectivity topographies, including functional connectome network structure, quasiperiodic pattern, functional connectivity gradients and brain network dynamics hierarchy. Importantly, functional connectivity reconstructed from these patterns preserves the intrinsic structural modularity, proving the robustness of the sparse cerebellar dynamics. Moreover, personalized CPCA-derived features enable accurate sex classification and prediction of cognitive, emotional, alertness and personality traits. Our findings position the cerebellum as an active, trait-sensitive integrator of brain-wide spatiotemporal organization, suggesting propagation-based motifs constitute a foundational mode of individual brain intrinsic function.