Cerebellar and subcortical contributions to working memory manipulation and skilled performance

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre 

The ability to adapt to changes in the environment is essential for skilled performance, especially in competitive sports and events, where experts consistently perform at the highest level, rapidly adapting to unpredictable conditions. Our ability to manipulate the contents of our working memory is also integral for our daily lives, whether it be organising our schedule, combining ingredients while we cook dinner or solving problems at work. While both of these capacities are typically linked to information processing through specialised cortical networks, I will demonstrate a series of combined neuroimaging and computational modelling approaches that link these capacities to distributed networks that link the cerebral cortex with a key set of subcortical regions – including the basal ganglia, thalamus and cerebellum. Overall, the results provide evidence that cerebellar and subcortical regions facilitate manipulation of working memory and skilled performance, and thus suggest a generalised mechanism through which the distributed subcomponents of our brain work together to support cognitive functions.