Although the cerebellum has been traditionally considered to be exclusively involved in motor control and learning, recent anatomical and clinical studies suggest that it may also have a role in cognition. However, no electrophysiological evidence exists to support this claim. Here we studied the activity of simple spikes of hand-movement related Purkinje cells in the mid-lateral cerebellum when monkeys learned to associate a well-learned right or left-hand movement with one of two visual symbolic cues. The cells had distinctly different discharge patterns between an overtrained symbol-hand association and a novel symbol-hand association although the kinematics of the movement did not change between the two conditions. The activity change was not related to the pattern of the visual symbols, the hand making the movement, the monkeys’ reaction times or the novelty of the visual symbols. We suggest that mid-lateral cerebellum is involved in higher-order cognitive processing related to learning a new visuomotor association.

Hand-movement related Purkinje neurons in midlateral cerebellum, which discharge during an overtrained visuomotor association task, change their activity when the monkey has to associate the same movements with new cues, even though the kinematics of the movements do not change.