Friday, January 23, 2004

12 noon

Redwood Neuroscience Institute

Title: Should we care about the cerebellum?

Richard Ivry

Department of Psychology

and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute

University of California, Berkeley

Abstract:

A focus of research program at the Redwood Institute is to understand the dynamics underlying associative processes within thalamocortico circuits. Such circuits are assumed to be the basis for the production of predictive behavior. Prediction is a ubiquitous consequence of neural activity. As such it is useful to consider another neural system that has been linked to prediction, the cerebellum. Indeed, while an emphasis on prediction may be somewhat novel in terms of cortical activity, this form of computation has been central to theoretical and empirical work on the cerebellum. I'll discuss current ideas about how the cerebellum may contribute to prediction and use this as a starting point for asking whether there are computational differences in the manner in which predictions are generated within different neural systems.