Although it is widely agreed that the cerebellum is necessary for learning and consolidation of new motor tasks, it is not known whether adaptation to kinematic and dynamic errors is processed by the same cerebellar areas or if different parts play a decisive role. We investigated arm movements in a visuomotor rotation and a force field perturbation task in 14 participants with cerebellar degeneration and 14 age- and gender-matched controls. MRI images were used to calculate the volume of cerebellar areas (medial, intermediate and lateral zones of the anterior and posterior lobe) and to identify cerebellar structure important for the two tasks. Corroborating previous studies, cerebellar participants showed deficits in adaptation to both tasks compared to controls (P < 0.001). However, it was not possible to draw conclusions from the performance in one task on the performance in the other task, because an individual participant could show severe impairment in one task, and perform relatively well in the other ( = 0.1; P = 0.73). We found that atrophy of distinct cerebellar areas correlated to impairment in different tasks. While atrophy of the intermediate and lateral zone of the anterior lobe correlated to impairment in the force field task ( = 0.72, 0.70, P = 0.003, 0.005, respectively), atrophy of the intermediate zone of the posterior lobe correlated to adaptation deficits in the VM task ( = 0.64; P = 0.015). Our results suggest that adaptation to the different tasks is processed independently and relies on different cerebellar structures.