Neuroscientists discovered a whole new role for the cerebellum

https://www.sciencealert.com/cerebellum-human-brain-neuroscience-discover-new-role-behaviour-reward-response

by ofou • 5 years ago

52 8 5 years ago

0xdeadb00f• 5 years ago

But last year neuroscientists discovered that it plays an important role in the reward response - one of the main drives that motivate and shape human behaviour.

There. That's probably what you came here for. Read the rest if you want details. But if like me you just wanted to know what "role" the headline is referring to.. There you have it.

lborsato• 5 years ago

And deny themselves the pleasure of the advertising? /s

jonnycomputer2• 5 years ago

Well the cerebellum has been known to use error-driven learning to coordinate sensor inputs and motor outputs. I'm not sure I've heard of it responding to reward specifically before (I'll have to ask my colleagues whether they get reward-sensitive BOLD response in their analyses). The article is sparse on details, and the link to the paper in Nature doesn't seem to actually point to an article...

Also, this article is from 2018, which should be noted.

Update: mattkrause points to the original paper, here:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28321129/

mattkrause3• 5 years ago

I don't think it's either of those: the article mentions Mark Wagner and Liqun Luo, who aren't authors.

I think I found it above, via the 2nd link in the article; it goes to a PR piece which ultimately links to the paper.

jonnycomputer2• 5 years ago

I'll update my post to point to yours. Thanks.

mattkrause3• 5 years ago

I'm a little disappointed at the framing.

This is certainly not the first article to claim that the cerebellum is involved in reward: there was a series of PET studies c. 2000 that reported that the cerebellum encoded reward prediction error, and it's mentioned in the abstract of Wolfram Shultz's 2000 Annual Review, so it must have been fairly mainstream even back then.

Alas, a growing chunk of neuroscience ignores everything that's not mouse optogenetics...

mattkrause3• 5 years ago

Actual paper: Wagner, M. J., Kim, T. H., Savall, J., Schnitzer, M. J., & Luo, L. (2017). Cerebellar granule cells encode the expectation of reward. Nature, 544(7648), 96-100.

Full text via PMC: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28321129/

nobodyandproud• 5 years ago

The cerebellum is a feature of other vertebrates. Anyone knows why the article paints this as uniquely mammalian?

Neuroscientists discovered a whole new role for the cerebellum

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