A close relationship between the cerebellum and the motor system was established early on. Conversely, the cerebellar involvement in a wide range of cognitive functions has a more recent history. Clinical and experimental reports linking the cerebellum with non-motor function began to appear in the late 1970s and from then on, the issue of a cerebellar role beyond motor control has sparked the interest of the neuroscience community.

Anatomical studies showed that the cerebellum is linked to associative and paralimbic cerebral areas, including the prefrontal regions and the hypothalamus, by means of both feedforward and feedback organized projections. These connections thus represent the anatomical substrate for the cerebellar control of cognitive processing, supporting the idea that cognitive functions are distributed among multiple cortical and subcortical modules.

A number of indications revealed the cerebellar involvement in a multiplicity of tasks, including linguistic processing, sensory discrimination, verbal memory, cognitive planning. In particular, substantial data support the view that the cerebellum, involved for executing a specific behavior, is also involved in any plastic modification of the behavior. PET and fMRI studies demonstrated that when an actual motor experience requires procedural learning, a clear cerebellar activation is present in the first phases of acquisition and then decreases to lower levels after practice. Thus, to cerebellar networks can be attributed the role of procedural machine to learn something. Since cerebellar computational properties participate in modifying behavior characteristics to optimise the actions and skills in a specific context, the cerebellar pathways are needed to build up appropriate responses and behavioral context-response linkage through trial and error learning. A particular aspect of such a cerebellar role is the control of the procedural spatial demands, pre-requisite for any declarative aspects of spatial learning. While neocortical and hippocampal regions are engaged in memory for spatial and object information and in locating objects in a given environment, the cerebellum is involved in the navigational system that controls the way to explore a new environment and to acquire spatial knowledge in relation to personal orientation. Once more, the development of the apt behavioral response, linking an environmental context to a behavioral response, is achieved through the cerebellar mediation. Recently, it has been demonstrated that this cerebellar mediation is also active during motor imagery and observation of action. The whole corpus of clinical and experimental findings indicates that the cerebellar circuits are involved in the "motor thought", whether or not it is accompanied by an overtly expressed motor act and contribute to internal representation of action. This representation is used not only to generate motor actions, but also to understand and learn the actions and skills of others by imitation. In fact, the cerebellum allows acquiring competencies through observation in behaviors just as efficient as the competencies acquired by actually performing the same task.