SEEING IN MOTION: EXPLORING PULVINAR CONTRIBUTIONS TO SELF-MOTION PROCESSING IN THE MOUSE VISUAL SYSTEM

As we navigate through the world, constant eye and head movements generate retinal motion that must be distinguished from environmental motion to maintain perceptual stability. While the pulvinar—a higher-order visual thalamic nucleus—has been implicated in integrating visual and motor signals, its specific role in processing self-motion during visual processing remains poorly understood. Here, we investigate how self-motion signals modulate visual processing in both the pulvinar and primary visual cortex (V1). Using extracellular recordings in awake head-fixed mice, we first characterized responses to passive head rotations (via motorized table) and spontaneous saccades in the dark to isolate non-visual components. We then presented systematic combinations of head rotation and visual motion to dissociate their individual contributions to cortical and thalamic activity. By comparing pulvinar and V1 responses, we assessed whether these structures perform similar or distinct computations when integrating self-motion with visual input. Our findings will provide new insights into how thalamic circuits process self-motion signals during active vision and may reveal mechanisms by which cortico-thalamic networks distinguish self-generated from externally-generated visual motion.