Cerebellar contribution to feedforward control of locomotion

• Main Authors: Iolanda ePisotta, Marco eMolinari
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2014-06-01
• Series: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
• Subjects: Locomotion; feed-forward control; cortico-cerebellar loops; movements prediction; sequencing hypothesis.
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00475/full

The cerebellum is an important contributor to feedforward control mechanisms of the central nervous system, and sequencing—the process that allows spatial and temporal relationships between events to be recognized—has been implicated as the fundamental cerebellar mode of operation. By adopting such a mode and because of cerebellar activity patterns are sensitive to a variety of sensorimotor-related tasks, the cerebellum is believed to support motor and cognitive functions that are encoded in the frontal and parietal lobes of the cerebral cortex. In this model, the cerebellum is hypothesized to make predictions about the consequences of a motor or cognitive command that originates from the cortex to prepare the entire system to cope with ongoing changes. In this framework, cerebellar predictive mechanisms for locomotion are addressed, focusing on sensorial and motoric sequencing. The hypothesis that sequence recognition is the mechanism by which the cerebellum functions in gait control is presented and discussed.