The association between eye movements and cerebellar activation during verbal working memory

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Jutta Peterburs
• Subject Area: Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: from 2012 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 226664536

There is a growing body of evidence for involvement of the cerebellum not only in motor-related processing but also in cognition. Verbal working memory for example appears to reliably recruit the cerebellum, as shown by numerous functional imaging studies. However, it has been argued that cerebellar activation during such cognitive tasks may only masquerade as cognition while actually reflecting processes related to planning of movements or motor learning. For instance, cerebellar activation observed in functional imaging studies of attention may in fact be associated with oculomotor behaviour rather than true involvement in attention. The current project is aimed to investigate whether cerebellar activation observed by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging during performance of a Sternberg verbal working memory task can be related to eye movements and hence oculomotor processing. The variant of the Sternberg task applied in the proposed project will require subjects to maintain a set of consonants in memory by rehearsal until a probe letter is presented. Subsequently, subjects have to indicate whether the probe matches one of the initially presented letters. Importantly, encoding and retrieval demands will be manipulated by applying normal quality and degraded stimuli during encoding, and by introducing low and high demand retrieval instructions. The proposed project therefore strives to determine if differences in cerebellar activation in the encoding and retrieval phases of the Sternberg task may also reflect phase-dependent differences in oculomotor processing. To this end, the proposed project is aimed to substantially contribute to our understanding of cerebellar function, and to help to further determine the specific role of the cerebellum in cognition.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor John E. Desmond, Ph.D.