Abstract
There is compelling evidence that the human cerebellum is engaged in a wide array of motor and cognitive tasks. A fundamental question centers on whether the cerebellum is organized into distinct functional sub-regions. To address this question, we employed a rich task battery, designed to tap into a broad range of cognitive processes. During four functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) sessions, participants performed a battery of 26 diverse tasks comprising 47 unique conditions. Using the data from this multi-domain task battery, we derived a comprehensive functional parcellation of the cerebellar cortex, and evaluated it by predicting functional boundaries in a novel set of tasks. The new parcellation successfully identified distinct functional sub-regions, providing significant improvements over existing parcellations derived from task-free data. Lobular boundaries, commonly used to summarize functional data, did not coincide with functional subdivisions. This multi-domain task approach offers novel insights into the functional heterogeneity of the cerebellar cortex.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a James S. McDonnell Foundation (Scholar award to J.D.), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (PJT 159520 to J.D.), a Platform Support Grant from Brain Canada and the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (BrainsCAN) to Western University, and the National Institute of Health (NS092079, NS105839 to R.I.). Data from the Human Connectome Project were analyzed, WU-Minn Consortium (Principal Investigators: David Van Essen and Kamil Ugurbil; 1U54MH091657) funded by the 16 NIH Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research; and by the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University.