Hippocampal-cerebellar interaction during spatio-temporal prediction

Abstract

The hippocampus and cerebellum play a role in the process of temporal memory formation. The interaction between these brain regions during the prediction of motor executions nevertheless remains unclear. Using fMRI, we show here that the hippocampus and cerebellum are co-activated during a timing-dependent task that requires accurate prediction timing of finger movements following preceding visual cues, but not during 2 control tasks: a reaction task requiring identical coordination of individual and combined fingers without predicting the motor timing, or an imagery task. In addition, functional connectivity analyses reveal that the hippocampus showed increased functional connectivity with the bilateral hemispheres of the cerebellum. These results suggest that hippocampal-cerebellar interplay occurs during spatio-temporal prediction of movements on the basis of visuomotor integration.