Figure 6.

This schematic is a more detailed version of figure 2 that includes putative laminar-specific connections that are consistent with the precision-based predictive coding scheme in the main text. This architecture is based upon Bastos et al. [17] and Shipp et al. [19] and conforms roughly to the known neuroanatomy and physiology of canonical microcircuits and laminar specificity of extrinsic connections. The key aspect of this figure is the inclusion of deep pyramidal cells encoding the amplitude of prediction error (squared) that inform posterior expectations about precision in the (matrix cells) of the pulvinar. These cells reciprocate descending projections to modulate the gain of superficial pyramidal cells in cortex. Forward connections are in red and descending (backward) connections are in black. First-order streams are shown as full lines and second-order (precision-related) streams are shown as dashed lines.