A realistic bi-hemispheric model of the cerebellum uncovers the purpose of the abundant granule cells during motor control.

The cerebellar granule cells (GCs) have been proposed to perform lossless, adaptive spatio-temporal coding of incoming sensory/motor information required by downstream cerebellar circuits to support motor learning, motor coordination, and cognition. Here we use a physio-anatomically inspired bi-hemispheric cerebellar neuronal network (biCNN) to selectively enable/disable the output of GCs and evaluate the behavioral and neural consequences during three different control scenarios. The control scenarios are a simple direct current motor (1 degree of freedom: DOF), an unstable two-wheel balancing robot (2 DOFs), and a simulation model of a quadcopter (6 DOFs). Results showed that adequate control was maintained with a relatively small number of GCs (< 200) in all the control scenarios. However, the minimum number of GCs required to successfully govern each control plant increased with their complexity (i.e., DOFs). It was also shown that increasing the number of GCs resulted in higher robustness against changes in the initialization parameters of the biCNN model (i.e., synaptic connections and synaptic weights). Therefore, we suggest that the abundant GCs in the cerebellar cortex provide the computational power during the large repertoire of motor activities and motor plants the cerebellum is involved with, and bring robustness against changes in the cerebellar microcircuit (e.g., neuronal connections).