Cerebellum and spatial cognition: A connectionist approach

A large body of experimental and theoretical work has investigated the role of the cerebellum in adaptive motor control, movement coordination, and Pavlovian conditioning. Recent experimental findings have also begun to unravel the implication of the cerebellum in high-level functions such as spatial cognition. We focus on behavioural genetic data suggesting that cerebellar long-term plasticity may mediate the procedural component of spatial learning. We present a spiking neural network model of the cerebellar microcomplex that reproduces these experimental findings. The model brings forth a prediction on the interaction between the neural substrates of procedural and declarative spatial learning.