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Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences logoLink to Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
. 2004 Apr 22;271(1541):789–796. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2003.2658

Recurrent cerebellar architecture solves the motor-error problem.

John Porrill 1, Paul Dean 1, James V Stone 1
PMCID: PMC1691672  PMID: 15255096

Abstract

Current views of cerebellar function have been heavily influenced by the models of Marr and Albus, who suggested that the climbing fibre input to the cerebellum acts as a teaching signal for motor learning. It is commonly assumed that this teaching signal must be motor error (the difference between actual and correct motor command), but this approach requires complex neural structures to estimate unobservable motor error from its observed sensory consequences. We have proposed elsewhere a recurrent decorrelation control architecture in which Marr-Albus models learn without requiring motor error. Here, we prove convergence for this architecture and demonstrate important advantages for the modular control of systems with multiple degrees of freedom. These results are illustrated by modelling adaptive plant compensation for the three-dimensional vestibular ocular reflex. This provides a functional role for recurrent cerebellar connectivity, which may be a generic anatomical feature of projections between regions of cerebral and cerebellar cortex.

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Selected References

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