Abstract
It is widely accepted that unexpected sensory consequences of self‐action engage the cerebellum. However, we currently lack consensus on where in the cerebellum, we find fine‐grained differentiation to unexpected sensory feedback. This may result from methodological diversity in task‐based human neuroimaging studies that experimentally alter the quality of self‐generated sensory feedback. We gathered existing studies that manipulated sensory feedback using a variety of methodological approaches and performed activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta‐analyses. Only half of these studies reported cerebellar activation with considerable variation in spatial location. Consequently, ALE analyses did not reveal significantly increased likelihood of activation in the cerebellum despite the broad scientific consensus of the cerebellum's involvement. In light of the high degree of methodological variability in published studies, we tested for statistical dependence between methodological factors that varied across the published studies. Experiments that elicited an adaptive response to continuously altered sensory feedback more frequently reported activation in the cerebellum than those experiments that did not induce adaptation. These findings may explain the surprisingly low rate of significant cerebellar activation across brain imaging studies investigating unexpected sensory feedback. Furthermore, limitations of functional magnetic resonance imaging to probe the cerebellum could play a role as climbing fiber activity associated with feedback error processing may not be captured by it. We provide methodological recommendations that may guide future studies.
Highlights
To successfully act within a dynamic environment, we continuously monitor sensory feedback associated with our own movements to ensure our actions have the desired outcomes
Our study suggests that this discrepancy stems from differential sensitivity and specific limitations of the experimental paradigms employed across MR neuroimaging altered sensory feedback experiments
We assessed methodological variations that may determine the success of brain imaging experiments in evoking cerebellar activation
Summary
To successfully act within a dynamic environment, we continuously monitor sensory feedback associated with our own movements to ensure our actions have the desired outcomes. The forward model is a computational process that compares expected to actual sensory consequences of an action (see Figure 1; Jordan & Rumelhart, 1992; Miall & Wolpert, 1996; Wolpert, 1997). This comparison is essential to motor control and relies partly on the cerebellum Such manipulations create an artificial mismatch between intended and perceived sensory consequences of an action, constituting methods commonly used to probe forward models in brain imaging studies
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