High Cognitive Violation of Expectations is Compromised in Cerebellar Ataxia

• DOI: 10.7554/elife.105864
• Publication Date: 2025-04-16T15:30:11Z
• Authors: Leonardo Daniel A; Eli Vakil; William Saban
• Keywords: Cerebellar ataxia

While traditionally considered a motor structure, the cerebellum is also involved in cognition. However, underlying cognitive mechanisms through which contributes to evolutionarily novel abilities remain poorly understood. Another open question how this structure core unifying mechanism across domains. Motivated by evolutionary principle of neural reuse, we suggest that successful account cerebellar contributions higher domains will build on structure’s established role behaviors. We conducted series neuropsychological experiments, assessing selective impairments participants with ataxia (CA) compared neurotypicals solving sequential discrete problems. In three were asked solve symbolic subtraction, alphabet letter transformation, and artificial grammar problems, expected or unexpected. The CA group exhibited disproportionate cost when comparing problems unexpected suggesting critical for violation expectations (VE) tasks. impairment was not found either complexity problem increased conditions uncertainty. Together, these results demonstrate possible causal human abilities. VE might be cerebellar-dependent