The cerebellum is not necessary for visually driven recalibration of hand proprioception

Abstract

Decades of research have implicated both cortical and subcortical areas, such as the cerebellum, as playing an important role in motor learning, and even more recently, in predicting the sensory consequences of movement. Still, it is unknown whether the cerebellum also plays a role in recalibrating sensory estimates of hand position following motor learning. To test this, we measured proprioceptive estimates of static hand position in 19 cerebellar patients with local ischemic lesions and 19 healthy controls, both before and after reach training with altered visual feedback of the hand. This altered visual feedback, (30° cursor-rotation) was gradually introduced in order to facilitate reach adaptation in the patient group. We included two different types of training (in separate experiments): the typical visuomotor rotation training where participants had full volition of their hand movements when reaching with the cursor, and sensory exposure training where the direction of participants׳ hand movements were constrained and gradually deviated from the cursor motion (Cressman, E. K., Henriques, D. Y., 2010. Reach adaptation and proprioceptive recalibration following exposure to misaligned sensory input. J. Neurophysiol., vol. 103, pp. 1888–1895). We found that both healthy individuals and patients showed equivalent shifts in their felt hand position following both types of training. Likewise, as expected given that the cursor-rotation was introduced gradually, patients showed comparable reach aftereffects to those of controls in both types of training. The robust change in felt hand position across controls and cerebellar patients suggests that the cerebellum is not involved in proprioceptive recalibration of the hand.