Cerebellar control of eye movements

One of the earliest consensuses reached by cerebellar physiologists is that an intact cerebellum is necessary for optimal motor performance. But how and where motor commands get adjusted to the defies of a perceptual error due to adversities in motor execution remains elusive. Oculomotor physiologists have tackled these questions using an exemplar model for motor control, eye movement, and a multifaceted approach consisting of correlation of structure and function, effects of lesions, neuronal recordings, and model simulations. This chapter reviews the literature and provides evidence that the cerebellum exerts control over all types of eye movements and that this control is distributed such that different regions of the cerebellum are more or less specialized in different types of eye movements. In addition to the online control of eye movements, the cerebellum plays a key role in motor learning of eye movements. Unifying theories of motor control built in part thanks to the data presented in this chapter suggest that the cerebellum is part of the neuronal circuit responsible for constructing predictions of the consequences of the motor command signal, prediction that are necessary for fine movement control.