Bottom-Up Modeling of Cerebro-Cerebellar Interaction

Motivation: Increasing scientific data about the primate cerebellum appears to show that the organ provides highly important assistance to the cerebrum in many domains. These include the scaling, coordinating, timing and adaptation of body stabilization, movement and force control, autonomic and emotional responses as well as a variety of cognitive processes. Intriguingly, the microscopic neural architectures of the different cerebellar subregions thought to mediate these different activities are almost identical. This suggests strongly that some type of fundamental cerebellar signal processing is highly beneficial, if not critical, to most human executive and perhaps many perceptual functions. A detailed, quantitative understanding of the interactions between the cerebrum and cerebellum should the be of considerable value in understanding brain function and dysfunction, for developing artificially intelligent systems, as well as for designing neurodiagnostic and neuroprosthetic devices.