Department of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy.
Department of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy; Cognitive Psychology Unit, IRCCS Mondino Foundation, Pavia, Italy.
Cortex. 2021 Feb;135:78-91. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2020.11.017. Epub 2020 Dec 5.
Traditionally, the cerebellum has been linked to motor functions, but recent evidence suggest that it is also involved in a wide range of cognitive processes. Given the uniformity of cerebellar cortex microstructure, it has been proposed that the same computational process might underlie cerebellar involvement in both motor and cognitive functions. Within motor functions, the cerebellum it is involved in procedural memory and associative learning. Here, we hypothesized that the cerebellum may participate to semantic memory as well. To test whether the cerebellum is causally involved in semantic memory, we carried out two experiments in which participants performed the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm (DRM) while online transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was administered over the right cerebellum or over a control site. In Experiment 1, cerebellar TMS selectively affected participants' discriminability for critical lures without affecting participants' discriminability for unrelated words and in Experiment 2 we found that the higher was the semantic association between new and studied words, the higher was the memory impairment caused by the TMS. These results indicate that the right cerebellum is causally involved in semantic memory and provide evidence consistent with theories that proposed the existence of a unified cerebellar function within motor and cognitive domains, as well with recent perspectives about cerebellar involvement in semantic memory and predictive functions.
传统上，小脑与运动功能有关，但最近的证据表明，它也参与了广泛的认知过程。鉴于小脑皮层微观结构的一致性，有人提出，相同的计算过程可能是小脑参与运动和认知功能的基础。在运动功能中，小脑参与程序性记忆和联想学习。在这里，我们假设小脑也可能参与语义记忆。为了检验小脑是否参与语义记忆，我们进行了两项实验，在这两项实验中，参与者在接受右小脑或对照部位在线经颅磁刺激（TMS）的同时，完成了 Deese-Roediger-McDermott 范式（DRM）。在实验 1 中，小脑 TMS 选择性地影响了参与者对关键诱饵的辨别力，而不影响参与者对不相关单词的辨别力；在实验 2 中，我们发现新单词和学习单词之间的语义关联越高，TMS 引起的记忆损伤就越高。这些结果表明，右小脑与语义记忆有关，并提供了与运动和认知领域存在统一小脑功能的理论一致的证据，也与小脑参与语义记忆和预测功能的最新观点一致。
