Cerebellar Damage Affects Contextual Priors for Action Prediction in Patients with Childhood Brain Tumor.

Cerebellar Damage Affects Contextual Priors for Action Prediction in Patients with Childhood Brain Tumor. Cerebellum. 2020 Jul 22;: Authors: Butti N, Corti C, Finisguerra A, Bardoni A, Borgatti R, Poggi G, Urgesi C Abstract Predictive coding accounts of action perception sustain that kinematics information is compared with contextual top-down predictions (i.e., priors) to understand actions in conditions of perceptual ambiguity. It has been previously shown that the cerebellum contributes to motor simulation of observed actions. Here, we tested the hypothesis that a specific contribution of the cerebellum to action perception is to provide contextual priors that guide the sampling of perceptual kinematic information. To this aim, we compared the performance of 42 patients with childhood brain tumor affecting infratentorial (ITT) or supratentorial (STT) areas with that of peers with typical development in an action prediction task. First, participants were exposed to videos depicting a child performing different reaching-to-grasp actions, which were associated with contextual cues in a probabilistic fashion. Then, they were presented with shortened versions of the same videos and asked to infer the action outcome; since kinematics was ambiguous, we expected their responses would be biased toward the previously learned contextual priors. We found that patients with brain tumor were impaired in predicting actions when compared to health...
Source: Cerebellum - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Cerebellum Source Type: research