Optimization of goal-directed movements in the cerebellum: a random walk hypothesis.

Voluntary goal-directed movements, such as arm reaching, are nearly optimized in terms of smoothness over the entire movement. Such smoothness is lost with cerebellar dysfunction, suggesting the essential role of the cerebellum in optimizing movement. However, it is still not clear how the cerebellum contributes to achieving smoothness over an entire movement. A recent study has shown that such smoothness of movement can be achieved by reducing the variance of errors at the end of the movement. Here, I hypothesize that the terminal errors conveyed by climbing fibers in the cerebellum serve to reduce not only the mean error, but also the variance of the error, through a process analogous to the random walk through movement control candidates. In the random walk, the direction of each step is randomly determined, but the size of each step is determined by the error at the end of each trial. Copyright 2002 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. and the Japan Neuroscience Society.