Causal role of the cerebellum in prediction for high-level cognition: neurocomputational investigations in patient populations

Assaf Breska, Independent group leader, Max-Planck institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen

Invited by: Anne Giersch & Philippe Isope

To survive in a rapidly dynamic world, the brain predicts the “what”, “where” and “when” of upcoming events and proactively adjusts perception, attention and action. The cerebellum has traditionally been associated with prediction and timing in the motor domain, while proactive perception and attention were associated with oscillatory mechanisms in cortical circuits. I will present a series of studies that combined computational modelling, psychophysics, and EEG recording in healthy and neurological populations to investigate mechanisms of dynamic prediction and the potential role of the cerebellum beyond motor control. These reveal that the cerebellum is indeed involved in non-motor prediction, of the timing of sensory events, as well as of semantic content in language. This is then leveraged to uncover causal cerebellar control of temporal variability in cortical circuits, identify unique entrainment mechanisms to isochronous streams, and study the computational overlap between implicit and explicit timing. Altogether, these findings expand our understanding of subcortical-cortical interactions in supporting prediction, timing, and high-level cognition, and inspire translational applications.