Abstract
This chapter reviews our recent studies of the climbing fiber’s heterosynaptic action on individual Purkinje cells and presents a new hypothesis, the “dynamic selection” hypothesis, regarding the functional basis for the sagittal zones of the cerebellum. This hypothesis is developed through a discussion of our findings as well as those from other laboratories in the context of two theories of climbing fiber function: one proposing that these afferents perform a major role in establishing en-grams in the cerebellar cortex required for motor learning and the other arguing that climbing fibers are most critical for real-time operations performed by the cerebellum during motor execution. Our experiments support the latter view by demonstrating a specific short-term action of climbing fibers on simple spike responses in passive paradigms as well as in multiple, sagittally organized Purkinje cells during perturbed locomotion. Other studies examining the effect of cerebellar ablation on the classically conditioned nictitating membrane/eyeblink response in rabbits substantiate our previously held contention that the cerebellum is neither sufficient nor necessary for this type of conditioned behavior currently being used as models for motor learning.
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Bloedel, J.R., Kelly, T.M. (1992). The Dynamic Selection Hypothesis: A Proposed Function for Cerebellar Sagittal Zones. In: Llinás, R., Sotelo, C. (eds) The Cerebellum Revisited. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2840-0_14
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