SpikeControl · Cerebellar Spiking Model For Real-time Closed-loop Sensorimotor Control

Cerebellar Spiking Model For Real-time Closed-loop Sensorimotor Control

Vestibular control coordination of eye movements is mostly mediated by the cerebellum, being the vestibular ocular reflex (VOR) the most studied reflex of them all. VOR produces rapid contralateral eye movements that stabilise the image on the fovea of the retina during head rotations and translations. VOR is therefore crucial to preserve clear vision, whilst it also plays a key role in maintaining balance through gaze stability. Changes in the VOR function can result in abnormal nygstamus, oscillopsia , visual vertigo and falls. Actually, falls in elderly have become a major public – health concern due to their social and economic costs. Since the vestibular control of eye movements helps to maintain equilibrium and spatial orientation, understanding the biological primitives in vestibular control becomes pivotal in combating falls in the elderly, abnormal nygstamus, oscillopsia or visual vertigo. The VOR depends on the vestibular system, which detects head rotation. VOR’s nature is purely feed-forward since it induces prompt compensatory eye movements as consequence of head movements. VOR is mediated by a control system in which adaptation is directly driven by sensorimotor errors: the cerebellum. The existing mismatch between head movements (signalled by the vestibular organ) and the incoming information to the cerebellum about eye movements represents sensory errors, which are called retinal slips. The feed-forward adaptive control mediated by the cerebellum aims at minimising these retinal slips. The VOR, together with eye-blink classical conditioning, is broadly assumed as the paradigm that better reveals cerebellar learning. During SPIKECONTROL, we modelled the neural basis of VOR control to provide a mechanistic understanding of the cerebellar functionality, which plays a key role in VOR adaptation. This work focused in testing the main theoretical hypotheses through this modelling approach. On the one hand, this work aimed at cross-linking data on VOR at behavioural and neural level. On the other hand, the developed VOR controller, based on cerebellar sensorimotor adaptation, was integrated within the simulated iCub and the actual iCub robot. Through the simulation of VOR control impairments, we examined possible consequences on the vestibular processing capabilities of the VOR model

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