fMRI research has revealed that cerebellar lobule VIIb/VIIIa exhibits load-dependent activity that increases with the number of items held in visual working memory (VWM). However, it remains unclear whether these cerebellar responses reflect processes specific to VWM or more general visual attentional mechanisms. To investigate this question, we examined whether cerebellar activity during the delay period of a VWM task is selective for stimuli held in working memory. A sample of male and female human subjects performed a VWM continuous report task in which they were retroactively cued to remember the direction of motion of moving dot stimuli. Cerebellar lobule VIIb/VIIIa delay-period activation accurately decoded the direction of the remembered stimulus, as did frontal and parietal regions of the dorsal attention network. Arguing against a motor explanation, no other cerebellar area exhibited stimulus specificity, including the oculomotor vermis, a key area associated with eye movement control. Finer-scale analysis revealed that the medial portion of lobule VIIb and to a lesser degree the lateral most portion of lobules VIIb and VIIIa, which exhibit robust resting state connectivity with frontal and parietal regions of the dorsal attention network, encoded the identity of the remembered stimulus, while intermediate portions of lobule VIIb/VIIIa did not. These findings of stimulus-specific coding of VWM within lobule VIIb/VIIIa indicate for the first time that the distributed network responsible for the encoding and maintenance of mnemonic representations extends to the cerebellum.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT There is considerable debate concerning where in the brain the contents of visual working memory (VWM) are stored. To date, this literature has primarily focused on the role of regions located within cerebral cortex. There is growing evidence for cerebellar involvement in higher-order cognitive functions including working memory. While the cerebellum has been previously shown to be recruited by VWM paradigms, it is unclear whether any portion of cerebellum actively encodes and maintains mnemonic representations. The present study demonstrates that cerebellar lobule VIIb/VIIIa activity patterns are selective for remembered stimuli and that this selectivity persists in the absence of perceptual input. These findings provide novel evidence for the participation of cerebellar structures in the persistent storage of visual information.

功能磁共振成像研究表明，小脑小叶 VIIb/VIIIa 表现出负载依赖性活动，该活动随着视觉工作记忆 (VWM) 中保存的项目数量的增加而增加。然而，目前尚不清楚这些小脑反应是否反映了 VWM 特有的过程或更一般的视觉注意机制。为了研究这个问题，我们检查了 VWM 任务延迟期间的小脑活动是否对工作记忆中保存的刺激具有选择性。男性和女性受试者样本执行了 VWM 连续报告任务，其中他们被追溯提示记住移动点刺激的运动方向。小脑小叶 VIIb/VIIIa 延迟期激活准确地解码了记忆刺激的方向，背侧注意力网络的额叶和顶叶区域也是如此。反对运动解释，没有其他小脑区域表现出刺激特异性，包括动眼蚓部，这是与眼球运动控制相关的关键区域。更精细的分析表明，小叶 VIIb 的内侧部分以及较小程度的小叶 VIIb 和 VIIIa 的最外侧部分，与背侧注意网络的额叶和顶叶区域表现出强大的静息状态连接，编码了记忆的身份刺激，而小叶 VIIb/VIIIa 的中间部分则没有。这些对 VIIb/VIIIa 小叶内 VWM 的刺激特异性编码的发现首次表明，负责记忆表征编码和维护的分布式网络延伸至小脑。

意义声明关于视觉工作记忆 (VWM) 的内容存储在大脑的何处，存在相当多的争论。迄今为止，这些文献主要关注大脑皮层内区域的作用。越来越多的证据表明小脑参与包括工作记忆在内的高阶认知功能。虽然小脑之前已被证明是由 VWM 范式招募的，但尚不清楚小脑的任何部分是否主动编码和维护助记符表示。本研究表明，小脑小叶 VIIb/VIIIa 活动模式对记忆刺激具有选择性，并且这种选择性在没有知觉输入的情况下持续存在。这些发现为小脑结构参与视觉信息的持久存储提供了新的证据。