Cerebellum, temporal predictability and the updating of a mental model

Abstract

We live in a dynamic and changing environment, which necessitates that we adapt to and efficiently respond to changes of stimulus form ('what') and stimulus occurrence ('when'). Consequently, behaviour is optimal when we can anticipate both the 'what' and 'when' dimensions of a stimulus. For example, to perceive a temporally expected stimulus, a listener needs to establish a fairly precise internal representation of its external temporal structure, a function ascribed to classical sensorimotor areas such as the cerebellum. Here we investigated how patients with cerebellar lesions and healthy matched controls exploit temporal regularity during auditory deviance processing. We expected modulations of the N2b and P3b components of the event-related potential in response to deviant tones, and also a stronger P3b response when deviant tones are embedded in temporally regular compared to irregular tone sequences. We further tested to what degree structural damage to the cerebellar temporal processing system affects the N2b and P3b responses associated with voluntary attention to change detection and the predictive adaptation of a mental model of the environment, respectively. Results revealed that healthy controls and cerebellar patients display an increased N2b response to deviant tones independent of temporal context. However, while healthy controls showed the expected enhanced P3b response to deviant tones in temporally regular sequences, the P3b response in cerebellar patients was significantly smaller in these sequences. The current data provide evidence that structural damage to the cerebellum affects the predictive adaptation to the temporal structure of events and the updating of a mental model of the environment under voluntary attention.

Shared Neural Mechanisms for the Prediction of Own and Partner Musical Sequences after Short-term Piano Duet Training

“…We therefore suggest that its involvement in the present study was built during the sensorimotor training process. However, since the mismatch measurements themselves do not involve motor behavior, our results suggest that the cerebellum contributes to prediction not only of motor actions but also of sensory sequences, consistent with recent findings from sensory and motor timing studies (Kotz et al, 2014). …”

Learning temporal statistics for sensory predictions in mild cognitive impairment

“…Finally, our results are consistent with recent work implicating cerebellum in sequence learning (e.g. serial reaction task) (Dirnberger et al, 2013;Tzvi et al, 2014) and predictive processing (Kotz et al, 2014;Leggio and Molinari, 2014).…”

Selective entrainment of brain oscillations drives auditory perceptual organization

“…This idea could provide a plausible explanation to previous studies showing that while deviant sounds embedded in task-relevant and non-task-relevant organizations elicit a change detection signal, only those marked as targets in the attended organization elicit a P3b auditory evoked potential (Sussman et al 2014). Although change detection is considered a pervasive property of the auditory system (Escera and Malmierca 2014), P3 component neural sources relate to those identified as the executive control system (Eichele et al 2005) and to predictive processing of temporal structure such as the cerebellum (Kotz et al 2014). …”