Title

Exploring the role of the human cerebellum across functional domains

Bio

Jörn Diedrichsen received a PhD in Neuroscience from UC Berkeley. After a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University and a faculty position at the University College London, he is now a Western Research Chair in the Western Institute for Neuroscience, and in the Departments for Computer Science and Statistical and Actuarial Sciences at Western. His CIHR-funded laboratory studies cerebellar function and motor control and motor learning in the human brain. He is also developing multivariate analysis techniques for functional imaging data and has authored a number of widely used analysis toolboxes.

Abstract

The cerebellum has evolved to support basic sensory-motor functions. In the human brain, the cerebellar circuitry has dramatically expanded and contributes to virtually every cognitive function, including working memory, language, and social cognition. Given its uniform cytoarchitecture, it has long been hypothesized that the cerebellar circuit performs a common computation across all these functional domains. But what is this elusive transform? To ultimately answer this question we require a better understanding of the functional diversity of the cerebellum, it’s connectivity to the neocortex, and the relationship between cortical and cerebellar processes in each functional domain. I will present results from a number functional neuroimaging studies to characterize cerebellar function across cognitive domains to start to address these questions in a systematic fashion.