Project description
The cerebellum’s silent mastery
While facts and figures often evaporate with time, the body’s ‘knowledge’, such as the ability to ride a bicycle, play a chord, or maintain balance, remains resilient. This points to a distinction in how the brain encodes information: whereas conscious, declarative memories are notoriously volatile, motor memories possess a unique permanence. However, the mechanistic foundations of this stability remain largely opaque, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of how the brain prioritises physical skill over abstract information. The ERC-funded SCULPTABELLUM project aims to explore the role of the cerebellum. It will test the hypothesis that motor stability is not just a byproduct of repetition, but a result of active refinement that continues long after the physical activity has ceased.
Objective
Long-term memories are consolidated over time, progressively becoming more stable and resistant to interference. The consolidation of motor memories is particularly robust – so much so that we use the term “like riding a bike” to describe things that we never forget. And yet, compared to declarative memory systems, relatively little is known about the neural mechanisms through which motor memories are consolidated in the brain. Several forms of motor learning require the cerebellum, a brain area that is often thought of as a machine-like input-output device in which sensory inputs are combined with state estimation to compute motor commands. However, recent work has emphasized the extent to which cerebellar circuit function is influenced by external features, such as the animal's behavioral state, or the statistics of the environment. Moreover, activity that occurs offline – between experimental sessions and even between individual trials, within sessions – can be crucial for cerebellar function. Here, we will investigate how cerebellar activity is sculpted over time, not only during the execution of cerebellum-dependent behaviors themselves, but also during offline ‘rest’ periods, and across stages of learning, to consolidate recent memories and update the system to allow it to learn new things. We will use temporally precise, cell-type-specific neural circuit manipulations and recordings to ask: 1. What are the mechanisms through which offline cerebellar activity contributes to memory consolidation? 2. What roles does memory consolidation play in long-term motor adaptation and metalearning, or ‘learning how to learn?’ 3. How do climbing fiber inputs to the cerebellum contribute to determining what is learned? Together, these experiments will reveal how cerebellar activity patterns are orchestrated across timescales to enable flexible and coordinated behavior in dynamic environments.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-ADG
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OX1 2JD Oxford
United Kingdom
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