Topic: cerebellar plasticity

A recent surge of experimental evidence points towards a significant role of the cerebellum in the development and maintenance of neocortical states through cortico-cerebellar loops. Notably, the re- sulting positive feedback loop is not limited to the motor domain to which the cerebellum is classically associated but has been shown to extend to various cognitive processes. However, it remains unclear what functional principles may underlie these cerebro-cerebellar loops. Here we model a neocortical area as a recurrent neural network which projects to, and receives from, a cerebellar feedforwa

Sensorimotor adaptation, crucial for refining movements in response to unexpected errors, fundamentally depends on the cerebellum. The olivary climbing fiber (CF) input to cerebellar Purkinje cells (PC) acts as a “teacher” signal during motor learning and drives cerebellar plasticity. Although the CF input reliably evokes PC dendritic spikes, it is not the only signal that modulates this post-synaptic response. To disentangle the modulation of the pre-synaptic CF burst from that of its post-synaptic PC dendritic response, we simultaneously imaged PC dendrites and CF terminals with 2-photon mic