Role of rostral fastigial neurons in encoding a body-centered representation of translation in three-dimensions (original) (raw)

Many daily behaviors rely critically on estimates of our body motion. Such estimates must be computed by combining neck proprioceptive signals with vestibular signals that have been transformed from a head- to a body-centered reference frame. Recent studies showed that deep cerebellar neurons in the rostral fastigial nucleus (rFN) reflect these computations, but whether they explicitly encode estimates of body motion remains unclear. A key limitation in addressing this question is that to date cell tuning properties have only been characterized for a restricted set of motions across head-re-body orientations in the horizontal plane. Here we examined for the first time how 3D spatio-temporal tuning for translational motion varies with head-re-body orientation in both horizontal and vertical planes in the rFN of male macaques. While vestibular coding was profoundly influenced by head-re-body position in both planes, neurons typically reflected at most a partial transformation. However...