Richard Ivry
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Neuroscience
The cerebellum, a dense structure at the back of the brain, was long treated as a movement controller. Brain imaging and studies of patients now show it also contributes to perception, attention, language, mathematics and emotion.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
cerebellum
cerebellar function
cognition
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2028
What they work on
- Test the CoRT hypothesis, that the cerebellum continuously transforms internal representations, by comparing people with spinocerebellar ataxia to healthy participants on motor, perceptual and social judgment tasks.
- Build an online testing program with spinocerebellar ataxia support networks to relate task performance to disease etiology, clinical ratings and region-specific cerebellar pathology in a large sample.
- Use functional neuroimaging with a large task battery in healthy young adults to model cortico-cerebellar connectivity and explain constraints on the cerebellum's functional map.
- Examine how the functional map of the human cerebellum changes over the course of learning, and establish normative data for comparison with neurologically impaired populations.
More about the research
Explanations of what it does outside movement, however, remain mostly descriptive or tied to single tasks. This work aims at a mechanistic account of cerebellar function across many kinds of tasks.
Why it matters
A mechanistic account of the cerebellum could help explain the cognitive and emotional difficulties experienced by people with spinocerebellar ataxia and other cerebellar disorders, which are often overlooked next to their movement symptoms. The patient and healthy-adult databases could support well-powered tests of how damage to specific cerebellar regions relates to everyday difficulties.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sharan Srinivasan
University of Michigan, MI·Neuroscience·Early-career
Test whether exercise improves motor behavior in spinocerebellar ataxia mouse models by correcting abnormal Purkinje neuron firing or through other pathways, using electrophysiology and motor testing.
Kathleen Gunthert
American University, DC·Neuroscience
Test whether excitatory or inhibitory non-invasive neuromodulation of right cerebellar lobule VII (RVII) selectively changes social learning, comparing it with sham stimulation in neurotypical adults and adults with autism.
John Houde
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Neuroscience
Relate the location of cerebellar degeneration to specific speech symptoms such as articulation, pitch and timing problems in patients with cerebellar ataxia, using speech psychophysics experiments.
The school
University of California-Berkeley: 46 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 825 research doctorates a year.
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