Although recently conceptualized as a neural node essential for a vast spectrum of associative and cognitive processes, the cerebellum has largely eluded attention in the research of aging, where it is marginalized mainly to structural analyses. In the current cross-sectional study of 67 healthy subjects of various ages (20 to 76 years), we sought to provide a comprehensive, multimodal account of age-related changes in the cerebellum during predictive motor timing, which was previously shown to engage this structure. We combined behavioral assessments of performance with functional MRI and voxel-based morphometry using an advanced method to avoid cerebellar deformation and registration imprecisions inherent to the standard processing at the whole-brain level. Higher age was surprisingly associated with stable behavioral performance during predictive motor timing, despite the massive decrease of infratentorial gray matter volume of a far higher extent than in the supratentorial region, affecting mainly the posterior cerebellar lobe. Nonetheless, this very area showed extensive hyperactivation directly correlated with age. The same region had decreased connectivity with the left caudate and increased connectivity with the left fusiform gyrus, the right pallidum, the hippocampus, and the lingual gyrus. Hence, we propose to extend the scaffolding theory of aging, previously limited mainly to the frontal cortices, to include also the cerebellum, which is likewise suffering from atrophy to a far greater extent than the rest of the brain and is similarly counteracting it by bilateral hyperactivation.

1st Department of Neurology Faculty of Medicine University Hospital of St Anne Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic Department of Neurology School of Medicine University of Minnesota Minneapolis MN USA

Center for Magnetic Resonance Research University of Minnesota Minneapolis MN USA 1st Department of Neurology Faculty of Medicine University Hospital of St Anne Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic

Department of Psychiatry Université de Montréal Montréal Québec Canada Functional Neuroimaging Unit Research Center of the Geriatric Institute affiliated with the Université de Montréal Montréal Québec Canada

Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière ICM Centre de NeuroImagerie de Recherche Sorbonne Université UMR S1127 Inserm U1127 CNRS 7225 Paris France

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