Effect of temporal difficulty on cerebrocerebellar interaction during visual duration discrimination

Abstract

The cerebellum has been demonstrated to be involved in various tasks requiring sensory discrimination, both for temporal and non-temporal events; however, little is known about the characteristic of its involvement. In this study, a visual duration discrimination task with various levels of temporal difficulty was examined to investigate the cerebrocerebellar interaction using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The cerebrocerebellar interaction analysis revealed that the cerebellum increased its activity in response to increasing temporal difficulty whereas the frontal cortex only increased its connective strength with the cerebellum but did not increase activity when the discrimination of temporal events was more difficult. The present findings support the view that better sensory information is provided by the cerebellum, which in turn may boost the efficiency of cortical computation for sensory discrimination.