A Multi-Domain Task Battery Reveals Functional Boundaries in the Human Cerebellum

Abstract

There is compelling evidence that the human cerebellum is engaged in a wide array of motor and cognitive tasks. A fundamental question centers on whether the cerebellum is organized into distinct functional sub-regions. To address this question, we employed a rich task battery, designed to tap into a broad range of cognitive processes. During four functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) sessions, participants performed a battery of 26 diverse tasks comprising 47 unique conditions. Using the data from this multi-domain task battery (MDTB), we derived a comprehensive functional parcellation of the cerebellar cortex and evaluated it by predicting functional boundaries in a novel set of tasks. The new parcellation successfully identified distinct functional sub-regions, providing significant improvements over existing parcellations derived from task-free data. Lobular boundaries, commonly used to summarize functional data, did not coincide with functional subdivisions. This multi-domain task approach offers novel insights into the functional heterogeneity of the cerebellar cortex.

The cerebellum is involved in processing of predictions and prediction errors in a fear conditioning paradigm

“…Although it cannot be excluded that part of the activation is 662 related to the preparation or subliminal execution of a withdrawal movement, motor-663 related processes are unlikely to explain the bulk of posterolateral activation. Hand and of lobule VI bilaterally in more complex movements (King et al, 2018;Schlerf et al, 2010). 666…”

Cerebellar grey matter volume in adolescence is associated with prodromal psychotic symptoms and norm-violating behavior

“…In particular, borders between several components were primarily organized along the medial-to-lateral dimension, and one component could span parts of several lobules. Together with results from recent fMRI-studies (86,87), these results suggest that traditional cerebellar subdivisions do not optimally capture either the inter-subject structural variability or the functional heterogeneity of the cerebellum.…”

Basal ganglia and cerebellar contributions to vocal emotion processing: a high resolution fMRI study

“…This cerebellar lobule was however recently integrated in the 'triple nonmotor representation' and evidence shows its limbic ties with the neocortex (Guell, Schmahmann et al 2018). It is also important to note here that many cerebellar sub-regions often labelled as 'motor' (for example, linked to hand or eye movements) are also significantly involved in cognitive or emotional tasks Schmahmann 2010, Stoodley, Valera et al 2012), a good example concerns lobules V, VI, VIII (King, Hernandez-Castillo et al 2019). Our results therefore converge toward a critical role of the cerebellum in coordination with the BG for both the decoding of vocal emotion ̶ in the temporal, voice-sensitive areas ̶ and the conversion to a motor response as an output behaviour following a subjective feeling of emotion (Frühholz, Trost et al 2016, Pierce andPéron 2020).…”

“…BG efferences also connect them more directly to the cerebellum, which can also be separated into motor, associative, limbic and cognitive subparts (Leggio and Olivito 2018). Cerebellum functional subparts were recently highlighted by resting state functional connectivity (Buckner, Krienen et al 2011), specific task-based parcellation (King, Hernandez-Castillo et al 2019) and cerebellar topography (Leggio and Olivito 2018). In the scope of the present study, the cerebellum would help fine-tune the selected response initiated in the BG, generate an internal model of current goal states and somehow close the loop of reward encoding (Larry, Yarkoni et al 2019, Pierce andPéron 2020) in addition to simultaneously assessing auditory timing for further iterations of vocal emotion decoding across time (Lesion studies: Grube, Cooper et al 2010, Breska and Ivry 2016, Breska and Ivry 2018.…”