Abstract
A growing body of evidence suggests that the cerebellum is involved in both cognition and language. Abnormal cerebellar development may contribute to neurodevelopmental disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, fetal alcohol syndrome, dyslexia, and specific language impairment. Performance in eyeblink conditioning, which depends on the cerebellum, can potentially be used to clarify the neural mechanisms underlying the cerebellar dysfunction in disorders like these. However, we must first understand how the performance develops in children who do not have a disorder. In this study we assessed the performance in eyeblink conditioning in 42 typically developing children between 6 and 11 years old as well as in 26 adults. Older children produced more conditioned eyeblink responses than younger children and adults produced more than children. In addition, females produced more conditioned eyeblink responses than males among both children and adults. These results highlight the importance of considering the influence of age and sex on the performance when studying eyeblink conditioning as a measure of cerebellar development.
Highlights
In eyeblink conditioning an originally neutral conditional stimulus (CS), such as a tone, is followed by a reflex eliciting unconditional stimulus (US), such as a puff of air to the cornea
The subject will produce an unconditional blink response (UR) to the air puff, but if the tone and air puff are paired repeatedly the subject will eventually acquire a conditioned blink response (CR), which begins before the onset of the US and peaks near the expected US
Post-hoc pairwise comparisons show that the initial increase in CRs levels off between the first and the second block for the children, and between the first block and the third block for the adults
Summary
In eyeblink conditioning an originally neutral conditional stimulus (CS), such as a tone, is followed by a reflex eliciting unconditional stimulus (US), such as a puff of air to the cornea. Several lines of evidence demonstrate that the cerebellum plays a critical role in the acquisition and expression of adaptively timed conditioned eyeblink responses [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. This opens up for the possibility that eyeblink conditioning can be used as a measure of cerebellar function and, by extension, of cerebellar dysfunction.
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