Possible engagement of the human cerebellum during object recognition

Abstract

Object recognition is essential to human cognition. It has been traditionally associated with the ventral temporal cortex (VTC). However, recent studies suggest that the cerebellum is also involved in visual object recognition. A natural question follows: Does the cerebellum contain category-selective regions like the VTC? How do category responses modulate the activity of the cerebellum? In order to investigate these questions, we propose a working memory task with five categories of stimuli that strongly engage high-level visual processing, related specifically to the recognition of objects. Then, we conducted a first-level analysis on the functional scan and aligned the contrast map to the SUIT atlas. We observed distinct activation patterns for each visual stimulus category in the cerebellum, suggesting that specific neural populations may subserve the working memory and recognition of a specific stimulus category. The activation pattern also suggests that the functional differentiation of the cerebellum may be more fine-grained than we once thought. Out of the five stimulus categories, the cerebellar regions selective to face stimuli overlap with activated regions during emotion processing tasks from previous studies. The regions selective to word stimuli overlap with regions previously attributed to language processing. Despite these findings, intersubject variability is high, and t-statistics do not reach significance after averaging across participants. To make the results more robust, we proposed a series of noise reduction strategies that could be used in future image acquisition and analysis. In the future, we hope to conduct the functional connectivity analysis again and find strong and consistent category-selective cerebellar regions.