Pretraining enhances recovery from visuospatial deficit following cerebellar dentate nucleus lesion

Following bilateral lesions targeting lateral deep cerebellar nuclei, rats were subjected to a bridge test as a measure of visuomotor coordination and were trained on the Morris water maze (MWM) as a measure of visuospatial processing. Lesioned rats were significantly impaired in visuospatial processing, but not visuomotor coordination, relative to sham rats. In a 2nd experiment, rats were pretrained on a delayed spatial alternation task (T maze) before MWM training. Pretraining reversed the visuospatial deficit caused by the lesions as compared with nonpretrained rats. Results suggest that lateral deep cerebellar nuclei contribute to visuospatial processing with a negligible contribution to visuomotor skills and that visuospatial deficits resulting from lateral nuclei damage can be reversed with pretraining on aspatial working memory task.