Abstract
Thalamic nuclei have long been regarded as passive relay stations for sensory information en route to higher level processing in the cerebral cortex. Recently, physiological and theoretical studies have reassessed the role of the thalamus and it has been proposed that thalamic nuclei may actively participate with cortical areas in processing specific information1,2,3,4. In support of this idea, we now show that a subset of neurons in an extrageniculate visual nucleus, the lateral-posterior pulvinar complex, can signal the true direction of motion of a plaid pattern, indicating that thalamic cells can integrate different motion signals into a coherent moving percept5,6,7,8. This is the first time that these computations have been found to occur outside the higher-order cortical areas5,6,9,10. Our findings implicate extrageniculate cortico–thalamo–cortical loops in the dynamic processing of image motion, and, more generally, as basic computational modules involved in analysing specific features of complex visual scenes.
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Acknowledgements
This work was funded in part by MRC and FCAR grants to C.C. We thank J. A. Movshon for providing the analysis software for the classification of neuronal responses and for commenting on the manuscript, and C. L. Baker Jr, A. M. Herbert, J. Faubert and M. von Grünau for discussions and suggestions. FRSQ provided most of the salary support for C.C., L.M. and A.D. were supported in part by FCAR-Centre and FRSQ-FCAR fellowships, respectively.
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Merabet, L., Desautels, A., Minville, K. et al. Motion integration in a thalamic visual nucleus. Nature 396, 265–268 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/24382
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/24382
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