Cerebellar disruption impairs working memory during evidence accumulation

To select actions based on sensory evidence, animals must create and manipulate representations of stimulus information in memory. We found that during accumulation of somatosensory evidence, optogenetic manipulation of cerebellar Purkinje cells reduced the accuracy of subsequent memory-guided decisions and caused mice to downweight prior information. Behavioral deficits were consistent with the addition of noise and leak to the evidence accumulation process, suggesting the cerebellum can influence the maintenance of working memory contents.