“Task-Dependent Visual Topographic Connectivity in the Human Cerebellum”.

Wietske Zuiderbaan, Wietske van der Zwaag, Tomas Knapen

Abstract The role of the cerebellum has long been thought to be limited to sensorimotor processes. Recently, its involvement in a broader set of cognitive and associative tasks has challenged this view. Recent studies have expanded the cerebellum’s functional repertoire into the visual domain, by identifying three topographically organized clusters exhibiting visual spatial responses using the population receptive field model. In this experiment, researchers used a simple retinotopic mapping stimulus during strict fixation. This represents a situation very different from our everyday vision, which is characterized by continual eye movements, and complex naturalistic visual stimulation. This makes it hard to translate the previous results to natural, active vision. Here, we used topographic connectivity from V1 to investigate the visual topographic organization in the human cerebellum (of either sex) and its dependence on cognitive state (comparing movie watching and resting state experiments). We find that movie watching evokes visual representations with a clear eccentricity gradient in OMV that was not found in a simple retinotopic mapping experiment. We furthermore discovered a novel topographically organized area in the cerebellum, again evoked specifically during movie watching and not in resting state. This latter area is located in the cerebellar Crus II area and falls within regions usually assigned to the cerebellar default mode network. Our results show that we can reveal task-dependent properties of the visual organization when using different cognitive states and how this can provide information about the processing of visual information, also in regions not previously considered to be visually responsive.