Neuroscientists discovered a whole new role for the cerebellum

I'm a little disappointed at the framing.

This is certainly not the first article to claim that the cerebellum is involved in reward: there was a series of PET studies c. 2000 that reported that the cerebellum encoded reward prediction error, and it's mentioned in the abstract of Wolfram Shultz's 2000 Annual Review, so it must have been fairly mainstream even back then.

Alas, a growing chunk of neuroscience ignores everything that's not mouse optogenetics...

Actual paper: Wagner, M. J., Kim, T. H., Savall, J., Schnitzer, M. J., & Luo, L. (2017). Cerebellar granule cells encode the expectation of reward. Nature, 544(7648), 96-100.

Full text via PMC: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28321129/

> But last year neuroscientists discovered that it plays an important role in the reward response - one of the main drives that motivate and shape human behaviour.

There. That's probably what you came here for. Read the rest if you want details. But if like me you just wanted to know what "role" the headline is referring to.. There you have it.

Well the cerebellum has been known to use error-driven learning to coordinate sensor inputs and motor outputs. I'm not sure I've heard of it responding to reward specifically before (I'll have to ask my colleagues whether they get reward-sensitive BOLD response in their analyses). The article is sparse on details, and the link to the paper in Nature doesn't seem to actually point to an article...

Also, this article is from 2018, which should be noted.

Update: mattkrause points to the original paper, here:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28321129/

The cerebellum is a feature of other vertebrates. Anyone knows why the article paints this as uniquely mammalian?