Psychology, School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore.
National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore.
Cerebellum. 2023 Jun;22(3):332-347. doi: 10.1007/s12311-022-01396-2. Epub 2022 Mar 31.
An increasing body of evidence points to the involvement of the cerebellum in cognition. Specifically, previous studies have shown that the superior and inferior portions of the cerebellum are involved in different verbal working memory (WM) mechanisms as part of two separate cerebro-cerebellar loops for articulatory rehearsal and phonological storage mechanisms. In comparison, our understanding of the involvement of the cerebellum in visual WM remains limited. We have previously shown that performance in verbal WM is disrupted by single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the right superior cerebellum. The present study aimed to expand on this notion by exploring whether the inferior cerebellum is similarly involved in visual WM. Here, we used fMRI-guided, double-pulse TMS to probe the necessity of left superior and left inferior cerebellum in visual WM. We first conducted an fMRI localizer using the Sternberg visual WM task, which yielded targets in left superior and inferior cerebellum. Subsequently, TMS stimulation of these regions at the end of the encoding phase resulted in decreased accuracy in the visual WM task. Differences in the visual WM deficits caused by stimulation of superior and inferior left cerebellum raise the possibility that these regions are involved in different stages of visual WM.
越来越多的证据表明小脑参与认知。具体来说，先前的研究表明，小脑的上部和下部参与不同的言语工作记忆（WM）机制，作为两个独立的脑-小脑回路的一部分，用于发音复述和语音存储机制。相比之下，我们对小脑在视觉 WM 中的参与的理解仍然有限。我们之前已经表明，右小脑上部的单次经颅磁刺激（TMS）会破坏言语 WM 的表现。本研究旨在通过探索小脑下部是否同样参与视觉 WM 来扩展这一概念。在这里，我们使用 fMRI 引导的双脉冲 TMS 来探测左小脑上部和左小脑下部在视觉 WM 中的必要性。我们首先使用 Sternberg 视觉 WM 任务进行 fMRI 定位器，该任务在左小脑上部和下部产生了目标。随后，在编码阶段结束时对这些区域进行 TMS 刺激会导致视觉 WM 任务的准确性降低。左小脑上部和下部刺激引起的视觉 WM 缺陷的差异表明，这些区域可能参与了不同的视觉 WM 阶段。
