Cellular Mechanisms Underlying Cerebellar Learning

In this chapter on cerebellar plasticity, we will largely focus on plasticity sites within the cerebellar cortex. The reason is that Purkinje cells—that provide the sole output signal leaving the cerebellar cortex—perform the most complex computations within the cerebellar network. These inhibitory projection neurons (Ito et al., 1970) process and ultimately present complex contextual information that is relevant for the fine tuning of motor and non-motor output, and they do so by optimizing synaptic weights at parallel fiber (PF) inputs—thus operating as a perceptron (Brunel et al., 2004; in a perceptron, input weights are optimized for specific input sorting tasks via supervised learning).