A computational model-based analysis of cerebellar plasticity in motor learning

The Cerebellum is involved in many cognitive and motor functions. This work focuses on the inspection of the role of the Cerebellum during motor learning. The investigation is led through simulation of a computational model representing the types and the connections of the different cerebellar neural structures. We inspect the role and the function of the main actor in cerebellar learning: the synaptic plasticity mechanism. The presence of different plasticity sites has been reported in the Cerebellum and this work aims at analysing the role of the two mechanisms of synaptic plasticity: Long-Term Depression (LTD) and Long Term Potentiation (LTP). We want to inspect their relevance in every site and the contribution of the site itself during motor learning. We have investigated the role of the Cerebellum in three different tasks: learning motor behaviours, acquiring conditioned responses and adapting the natural vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR). We have also simulated lesion-based scenario where we caused artificial lesions at granule cells, the input processing units for all the analysed tasks. Our work remarks some results reported in literature and also leads to some new considerations about the role of some plasticity sites.