Figure 3: Associative thalamic nuclei integrate convergent cortical inputs into cognitive control signals such as decision confidence or input uncertainty.

(A) Top: A random dot motion task with three alternative choices where macaque monkeys had to make a categorical choice based on the relative ratio of dots of one color moving in a particular direction (up or down) to get a reward or opt-out for a small but certain reward. Bottom: Activity in the dorsal Pulvinar is predictive of an animal’s confidence in choice accuracy. Adapted from Komura and others 2013. (B) Computational model of the dorsomedial Pulvinar with two cortical ensembles, differentially sensitive for motion, that converge onto single Pulvinar neurons. (C) Simulated Pulvinar neurons from the model (bottom) integrates the cortical activity and approximates the absolute value of the of the difference in rates of the competing cortical neurons (top). Adapted from Jaramillo and others 2019. (D) A rodent attention control task where on each trail an animal has to make a categorical decision on the dominant sound pulse type (high pass; HP vs low pass; LP) in a mixed string of pulses made of HP, LP and non-informative white noise (choice 1). Subsequently the animal selects the target action (attend to vision vs attend to audition) that corresponds to the dominant pulse (choice 2). (E) Optogenetic inactivation the medio dorsal thalamus diminishes performance as a function of tracking uncertainty. (F) Medio dorsal thalamic neurons preferentially track input uncertainty while the PFC encodes rules. Adapted from Mukherjee and others 2021. (G) A modification of the random dot motion task where features of the dots vary across 4 visual dimensions and subjects have to perform a categorical discrimination based on 1 of the pre-cued features. Subjects were pre cued to attend to varying number of features (1 to 4) thus increasing the uncertainty of the feature relevant to the discrimination. (H) Thalamic BOLD magnitude shows correlation to attentional uncertainty and is parametric to it (I). Adapted from Kosciessa and others 2021.