It is widely accepted that unexpected sensory consequences of self-action engage the
cerebellum. However, we currently lack consensus on where in the cerebellum, we find
fine-grained differentiation to unexpected sensory feedback. This may result from
methodological diversity in task-based human neuroimaging studies that experimentally alter the quality of self-generated sensory feedback. We gathered existing studies
that manipulated sensory feedback using a variety of methodological approaches and
performed activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses. Only half of these
studies reported cerebellar activation with considerable variation in spatial location.
Consequently, ALE analyses did not reveal significantly increased likelihood of activation in the cerebellum despite the broad scientific consensus of the cerebellum's
involvement. In light of the high degree of methodological variability in published studies, we tested for statistical dependence between methodological factors that varied
across the published studies. Experiments that elicited an adaptive response to continuously altered sensory feedback more frequently reported activation in the cerebellum
than those experiments that did not induce adaptation. These findings may explain the
surprisingly low rate of significant cerebellar activation across brain imaging studies
investigating unexpected sensory feedback. Furthermore, limitations of functional
magnetic resonance imaging to probe the cerebellum could play a role as climbing fiber
activity associated with feedback error processing may not be captured by it. We provide methodological recommendations that may guide future studies