Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 15, 2026
13:51
Cross-Modal Multivariate Pattern Analysis
Published on: November 9, 2011
A thalamocortical circuit encoding deviations from sensory history
Yi Ning Leow1,2,3, Arundhati Natesan1, Alexandria Barlowe1
1The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory (PILM), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA.
Science (New York, N.Y.)
|August 13, 2026
Summary
Prior expectations influence decisions by helping the brain evaluate sensory evidence. The lateral posterior (LP) to anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) pathway supports this by creating history-referenced representations.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Decision-Making
- Sensory Processing
Background:
- Prior expectations and attention are crucial for decision-making and perceptual filtering.
- The lateral posterior (LP) nucleus, part of the rodent pulvinar, projects to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a region involved in attention and prediction.
- The role of the LP-ACC pathway in history-dependent evidence evaluation during decision-making remains unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the function of thalamic LP projections to the ACC in history-dependent evaluation of sensory evidence.
- To determine if the LP-ACC pathway supports selective attention and predictive processing during a visual discrimination task.
Main Methods:
- Optogenetic manipulation of LP-ACC axons in mice performing a visual discrimination task.
- Two-photon imaging of LP-ACC axon activity.
- Analysis of choice behavior and stimulus history (|ΔDir|).
Main Results:
- Optogenetic disruption of LP-ACC axons impaired history-dependent evaluation of sensory evidence.
- Manipulations led to choice biases that depended on the difference between consecutive stimuli (|ΔDir|).
- LP-ACC axons represented stimuli on a curved manifold whose geometry scaled with |ΔDir|, highlighting larger deviations.
Conclusions:
- The LP-ACC pathway is critical for implementing history-dependent evaluation of sensory evidence during decision-making.
- This thalamocortical pathway provides a contrastive, history-referenced representation of sensory information.
- Findings reveal a neural mechanism for integrating past evidence with current stimuli to guide choices.
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