Schultz, Wolfram. Predictive reward signal of dopamine neurons. is called rewards, which elicit and reinforce approach behav-J. Neurophysiol. 80: 1–27, 1998. The effects of lesions, receptor ior. The functions of rewards were developed further during blocking, electrical self-stimulation, and drugs of abuse suggest the evolution of higher mammals to support more sophistithat midbrain dopamine systems are involved in processing reward cated forms of individual and social behavior. Thus biologiinformation and learning approach behavior. Most dopamine neucal and cognitive needs define the nature of rewards, and rons show phasic activations after primary liquid and food rewards and conditioned, reward-predicting visual and auditory stimuli. the availability of rewards determines some of the basic They show biphasic, activation-depression responses after stimuli parameters of the subject’s life conditions. that resemble reward-predicting stimuli or are novel or particularly Rewards come in various physical forms, are highly variable salient. However, only few phasic activations follow aversive stim-in time and depend on the particular environment of the subject. uli. Thus dopamine neurons label environmental stimuli with appe- Despite their importance, rewards do not influence the brain titive value, predict and detect rewards and signal alerting and motivating events. By failing to discriminate between different

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Single-unit evidence for eye-blink conditioning in cerebellar cortex is altered, but not eliminated, by interpositus nucleus lesions.

We report a series a three psychophysical experiments designed to differentiate the contributions of the neocerebellar and prefrontal cortex to time perception. Comparison of patients with focal, unilateral neocerebellar or prefrontal lesions on temporal discrimination of Z. 400-ms and 4-s intervals Expt. 1 indicated that neocerebellar damage impaired timing in both millisecond and seconds ranges, whereas prefrontal damage resulted in deficits that were robust only at the longer duration. Patients with prefrontal lesions, however, also Z. exhibited working memory deficits on a non-temporal task Expt. 2 , biases in point of subjective equality indicative of attentional Z. deficits, and were disproportionately sensitive to strategic manipulations in a long-duration discrimination task Expt. 3 . In contrast, the pervasive timing deficits of cerebellar patients were relatively insensitive to strategic support and could not be readily explained by general deficits in working memory or attention. These findings support the hypothesis that neocerebellar regions subserve a central timing mechanism, whereas the prefrontal cortex subserves supportive functions associated with the acquisition, maintenance, monitoring and organization of temporal representations in working memory. Such functions serve to bridge the output of the central timing mechanism with behavior. Together, these regions appear to participate in a working memory system involved in discrimination of durations extending from a few milliseconds to many seconds. q 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

doi: 10.3389/fnana.2012.00008 An agonist–antagonist cerebellar nuclear system controlling eyelid kinematics during motor learning