Topic: Cognitive Processing in the Monkey Cerebellum

Speaker: Michael E. Goldberg, MD.( Columbia University Medical Center )

Time: 10:00-11:30, Tue, May 8th, 2018

Location: #1113, Wangkezhen Building, Peking University

Host: Prof. Fang Fang

Abstract: 

It is well known that the cerebellum is important in motor control and motor learning. However, recent fMRI and anatomical studies have demonstrated that the cerebellum projects to prefrontal areas that are not intimately related to motor control.  We trained monkeys on a visuomotor learning task, in which they learn to assign one of two symbols to a well-learned left hand movement, and the other to a well-learned right hand movement.  Hand-movement related cerebellar Purkinje cells fire during the task when the symbols are overlearned.  When we change the symbols to fractal symbols that the monkey has never seen before, the activity of the neurons changes immediately, and tracks the learning process, although the kinematics of the movements do not change.   During one particular epoch of the trial, a given neuron will report the success or failure of the prior trial.  This difference epoch can occur from the beginning of the trial to the period immediately after the hand movement. Across the population, the difference epochs tile the entire trial, so that at any given time in the trial a subset of neurons is reporting prior success or failure.  This is the first demonstration of learning-related activity in the monkey where the kinematics of the movement did not change, but the monkey had to learn the significance of a new set of symbols.