Ferrari, C. 1 , Cattaneo, C. 1, 2 , Oldrati, V. 2, 3 , Casiraghi, L. 2, 3 , Castelli, F. 3 , D?Angelo, E. 2, 3 & Vecchi, T. 2, 3
1 Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan 20126, Italy.
2 IRCCS Mondino Foundation, Pavia 27100, Italy.
3 Department of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, University of Pavia, Pavia 27100, Italy.
Growing evidence suggests that the cerebellum is not only involved in motor functions, but it significantly contributes to sensory and cognitive processing as well. In particular, it has been hypothesized that the cerebellum identifies recurrent serial events and recognizes their violations. Here we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to shed light on the role of the cerebellum in short-term memory of visual sequences. In two experiments, we found that TMS over the right cerebellar hemisphere impaired participants? ability to recognize correct order of appearance of geometrical stimuli varying in shape and/or size. In turn, cerebellar TMS did not affect recognition of highly familiar short sequences of letters or numbers. Overall, our data suggest that the cerebellum is involved in memorizing the order in which (concatenated) stimuli appear, this process being important for sequence learning.