Visual cortex instructs learning during adaptive decision-making

Our brains integrate sensory information with prior-knowledge to guide decisions. However, through which neural pathways experience can adapt behavioural responses is unclear. Predator-avoidance behaviors, particularly escape from visual-threats, represent behavioral manifestations of a decision-making process essential for survival, with the threat-value undergoing constant revision. Learning if a potentially threatening stimulus is dangerous, necessitates the integration of sensory evidence, experience and context. We speculated that visual cortex, in particular higher visual areas (HVAs), would be well placed to integrate these signals and facilitate adaptive behavior. Asking how mice learn to suppress fear responses to innate threats, and if HVAs play a role in this adaptative decision-making.Mice escape from an innately threatening visual stimulus, a dark overhead expanding disk. After being repeatedly exposed they cease to escape. Our findings reveal that lateral HVAs play a pivotal role in learning to suppress innate threats via a subcortical pathway through the ventrolateral geniculate nucleus (vLGN). Optogenetic suppression of lateral HVA or HVA projections to vLGN during the learning process prevented suppression of escape. Interestingly, silencing HVA after learning had no impact. Chronic electrophysiological single-unit recordings in vLGN revealed a subset of neurons that increased their activity during learning. Remarkably, these neurons received strong input from HVA. Suppression of vLGN activity reversed the behavioral learning effect, indicating that while HVAs instruct learning, the memory of the stimulus’s threat level is encoded within vLGN populations.Altogether, we uncovered a novel corticofugal pathway with a central role in experience-dependent adaptation of ethologically highly relevant behaviour.