Cerebellar Microcircuits and Cortico-Cerebellar Cooperation Enable Robust Decisions

Abstract

The cerebellum is increasingly implicated in perceptual decision-making, yet how cerebellar circuits-- without prominent recurrent excitation and slow reverberant loops--could support sparse evidence accumulation over behavioral timescales remains unclear. We present a biologically constrained modeling framework showing that cerebellar microcircuits can implement graded accumulation and competition without cortical-like excitatory recurrence. Type-II Purkinje-neuron excitability generates firing-rate hysteresis that prolongs the impact of brief inputs far beyond intrinsic membrane and synaptic time constants, enabling accumulation across long inter-event intervals. Purkinje neuron collateral inhibition produces competitive divergence and tunes temporal evidence weighting, revealing a trade-off between commitment and primacy bias. In a bidirectionally coupled cortico-cerebello-cortical model, cerebellar processing reduces primacy while cortical processing reduces indecision, improving robustness. Together, these results propose a mechanistic division of labor that positions the cerebellum as an active computational partner in perceptual decisions.