During delay classical conditioning of the eyelid response, which models both associative learning and motor learning, the essential memory is formed in the cerebellum. In this chapter we discuss how the cerebellar cortex and cerebellar nuclei may synergistically interact to generate conditioned eyelid responses. For this, we first describe some important behavioral aspects of eyeblink conditioning, including new data on the effects of conditional stimulus (CS) durations that are either shorter or longer than the trained CS-unconditional stimulus interval. Second, we provide a systematic overview of the neuroanatomical circuits involved in eyeblink conditioning. In the third part we discuss the contributions of various forms of neural plasticity in the cerebellar cortex and cerebellar nuclei to the formation of a memory trace during eyeblink conditioning. Together, these parts allow us to synthesize an overview of putative encoding mechanisms underlying eyeblink conditioning.

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doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-801386-1.00003-4, hdl.handle.net/1765/90747
Department of Neuroscience

Boele, H.-J., ten Brinke, M., & de Zeeuw, C. (2015). Classical Conditioning of Timed Motor Responses: Neural Coding in Cerebellar Cortex and Cerebellar Nuclei. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-801386-1.00003-4