Cerebellar damage affects the inference of human motion

ABSTRACT

The present study aims at the cerebellum’s role in prediction mechanisms triggered by action observation. Five cerebellar patients and six age-paired control subjects were asked to estimate the occluded end point position of the shoulder’s trajectories in Sit-to-Stand (STS) or Back-to-Sit (BTS) conditions, following or not biological rules. Contrarily to the control group, the prediction accuracy of the end point position in cerebellar patients did not depend on biological rules. Interestingly, both groups presented similar results when estimating the vanishing position of the target. Taken together, these results suggest that cerebellar damage affectsthe capacity of predicting upcoming actions by observation.

KEYWORDS:

• Motion inference
• cerebellar damage
• internal models of action
• kinematic rules
• motor resonance

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e tecnológico CNPq (grant number 309560/2017-9). CDV is supported by Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro FAPERJ (grants E26/010002474/2016, CNE 202.785/2018) and Financiadora de Estudos e projetos FINEP (PROINFRA HOSPITALAR grant 18.569-8). This work was produced as part of the activities of the Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo FAPESP’s Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics-NeuroMat (FAPESP grant 2013/07699-0). This research was also supported by grants from CAPES-COFECUB (project n°819-14).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).