You may not be aware of it, but our brains are constantly making predictions of the future states in what we see (perception), what we do (action), and what we think (cognition). The cerebellum (Latin for “little brain”) has thought to be the powerhouse that learns repetitive patterns of movement and builds a predictive internal model to simulate motor outcomes. For example, predicting the trajectory of a moving ball and the position of our hand to successfully catch it. My research focused on the predictive function of the cerebellum in cognition. We designed a task using sequence of letters to mimic an articulatory trajectory and tested the participant’s ability to identify the next letter in line in two studies.
1. Participants were more likely to make mistakes in their letter prediction when we applied pulses to disrupt cerebellar functioning.
2. Participants were significantly faster to identify the next letter in line if the presented letter matches to their prediction than not.
Our brains actively generate predictions of the sensory input that we will most likely receive, which allows the predicted stimulus to be processed more efficiently and thus it requires less neural resources and time.
Read more about our studies: "Disruption of Cerebellar Prediction in Verbal Working Memory"
"Cerebro-Cerebellar Response to Sequence Violation in a Cognitive Task: an fMRI Study"