A Method for the Study of Cerebellar Cognitive Function—Re-Cognition and Validation of Error-Related Potentials

Abstract

The cerebellar region has four times as many brain cells as the brain, but whether the cerebellum functions in cognition, and how it does so, remain unexplored. In order to verify whether the cerebellum is involved in cognition, we chose to investigate whether the cerebellum is involved in the process of error judgment. We designed an experiment in which we could activate the subject’s error-related potentials (ErrP). We recruited 26 subjects and asked them to wear EEG caps with cerebellar regions designed by us to participate in the experiment so that we could record their EEG activity throughout the experiment. We successfully mitigated the majority of noise interference after a series of pre-processing of the data collected from each subject. Our analysis of the preprocessed data revealed that our experiment successfully activated ErrP, and that the EEG signals, including the cerebellum, were significantly different when subjects made errors compared to when they made correct judgments. We designed a feature extraction method that requires selecting channels with large differences under different classifications, firstly by extracting the time-frequency features of these channels, and then screening these features with sequence backward feature (SBS) selection. We use the extracted features as the input and different event types in EEG data as the labels for multiple classifiers to classify the data in the executive and feedback segments, where the average accuracy for two-class classification of executive segments can reach 80.5%. The major contribution of our study is the discovery of the presence of ErrP in cerebellar regions and the extraction of an effective feature extraction method for EEG data.