May 06, 2022

A study by Group C01 (Tanaka) has been published in Nature Communications.

The cerebellum is thought to be involved in synchronized movements, such as dancing to music or clapping hands, but the underlying neural mechanisms are largely unknown. In this study, the authors trained monkeys to move their eyes in synchrony with alternating visual stimuli that appeared at regular intervals. They found that individual neurons in the cerebellum predicted the timing of each stimulus and modulated their activity for errors of movement timing, revealing part of the mechanism for synchronized movements.
Ken-ichi Okada, Ryuji Takeya, Masaki Tanaka. Neural signals regulating motor synchronization in the primate deep cerebellar nuclei. Nature Communications, 13, 2504 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-30246-2