Psychological functions of the cerebellum

Abstract

For most of the 20th century, the brain science community held the view that the cerebellum was exclusively involved in motor control functions. Over the past 20 years, this has largely been replaced by the idea that the cerebellum participates in a variety of motor and nonmotor functions and, importantly, may contain neurons that display long- and short-term plasticity, encoding behavioral and cognitive functions. The authors present evidence for the involvement of the cerebellun in motor and nonmotor functions and further suggest that the cerebellum's internal neural architecture and connectivity patterns with other areas of the brain determine the range of functions that the cerebellum participates in. To stress the interactive nature of the structure, the authors suggest that the phenomena that the cerebellum encodes may be best described generally as the psychological functions of the cerebellum instead of attempting to categorize all functions as either motor or nonmotor.