Topic: higher-order thalamus

Decisions are often guided by detecting subtle signals in a dynamic sensory environment. Although the brain must track such decision-relevant signals, how they are represented and transformed by neural activity across the sensorimotor axis remains poorly understood. Here, we recorded neural activity with Neuropixels probes across dozens of brain regions while mice performed a visual change-detection task. We trained mice to detect a sustained increase in temporal-frequency (TF) of a drifting grating stimulus, whose speed fluctuates stochastically around the mean of 1Hz. The task requires mice

Interactions between the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) and higher-order thalamus play a critical role in cognitive behaviors and are disrupted in neuropsychiatric disorders. Here we find that layer 6 (L6) cortico-thalamic (CT) neurons in the PFC make excitatory connections onto both mediodorsal (MD) and ventromedial (VM) thalamus. We examine how these neurons evoke activity in vivo, with a mix of direct excitation and feed-forward inhibition in MD, but excitation alone in VM. This reflects unexpected connectivity in the anterior thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN), with PFC inputs primarily cont

The higher-order thalamus has an important role for cortico-thalamo-cortical information processing. A precise knowledge of the anatomical structure of thalamocortical projections is necessary to better understand this kind of information processing compared to direct cortico-cortical routes. Therefore, neurons in the thalamus of mice were retrogradely labelled by injecting cholera toxin subunit B conjugates into the primary somatosensory cortex and the motor cortex. The stained neurons were automatically detected in the microscopic images and then assigned to corresponding anatomical structur