Cerebellar patients have intact feedback control that can be leveraged to improve reaching

Abstract
Data availability
Article and author information
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Abstract

It is thought that the brain does not simply react to sensory feedback, but rather uses an internal model of the body to predict the consequences of motor commands before sensory feedback arrives. Time-delayed sensory feedback can then be used to correct for the unexpected—perturbations, motor noise, or a moving target. The cerebellum has been implicated in this predictive control process. Here we show that the feedback gain in patients with cerebellar ataxia matches that of healthy subjects, but that patients exhibit substantially more phase lag. This difference is captured by a computational model incorporating a Smith predictor in healthy subjects that is missing in patients, supporting the predictive role of the cerebellum in feedback control. Lastly, we improve cerebellar patients’ movement control by altering (phase advancing) the visual feedback they receive from their own self movement in a simplified virtual reality setup.

Data availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study will be openly on the JHU Data Archive under DOI 10.7281/T1/BCARLC.The data will be available here: https://archive.data.jhu.edu/dataverse/LIMBS

The following data sets were generated

1. Zimmet AM
2. Cao D
3. Bastian AJ
4. Cowan NJ
(2020) Data Associated with publication: Cerebellar patients have intact feedback control that can be leveraged to improve reaching
JHU Data Archive , 10.7281/T1/BCARLC.

http://dx.doi.org/10.7281/T1/BCARLC

Article and author information

Author details

Amanda M Zimmet

Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-1457-3072
Di Cao

Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-1547-9929
Amy J Bastian

Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Noah J Cowan

Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States

For correspondence
ncowan@jhu.edu

Competing interests
Noah J Cowan, Reviewing editor, eLife.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-2502-3770

Funding

National Institutes of Health (HD040289)

Amy J Bastian
Noah J Cowan

Applied Physics Laboratory Graduate Fellowship

Amanda M Zimmet

National Science Foundation (1825489)

Di Cao
Amy J Bastian
Noah J Cowan

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: The experimental protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (protocol # IRB00182673) and all participants gave informed consent prior to joining this study, according to the Declaration of Helsinki.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.