Table 1.
Summary of main findings from studies investigating the involvement of the rodent anterior thalamic nuclei in non-spatial processes.
| Cognitive Domain | Task | Behavioural effects |
|---|---|---|
| Temporal context | Within Block Recency | ✓* |
| Between Block Recency | ✗* | |
| Context as ‘place’ | Fear conditioning | ✓* |
| Biconditional discriminations - distal cues | ✓* | |
| Biconditional discriminations - local cues | ✗ | |
| Context as abstract rules | ‘Stroop’ task | ✓ |
| Recognition memory | Novel object recognition | ✗ |
| Affective processes | Elevated plus maze | ✓ |
| Learning | Discrimination learning (electrophysiology) | ✓ |
| (lesion studies) | ✗ | |
| Discrete cue conditioning (aversive) | ✗ | |
| Discrete cue conditioning (appetitive) | ✗ | |
| Reversal learning | ✗ | |
| Instrumental conditioning | ✗ | |
| Attention | Vigilance/sustained attention | ✗ |
| Intra-dimensional set-shifting | ✓ | |
| Extra-dimensional set-shifting | ✓ |
✓ denotes behavioural effects have been found; ✗ denotes no behavioural effects; * denotes hippocampal-dependent task.