Functions of the thalamus in perception and cognition

描述（由申请人提供）：枕是灵长类丘脑中最大的核团，被认为是高级丘脑核团，因为它几乎只与皮质形成输入-输出回路。从解剖学的角度来看，枕是理想的位置，以调节信息传输到皮层和皮层区域之间的影响知觉和认知过程。然而，支持这种功能作用的实验证据很少。枕在视觉感知和认知中发挥重要作用的最令人信服的证据来自人类和猴子的病变研究。这些研究指出枕区在许多基本的认知功能中起着重要的作用，包括定向反应和视觉空间的探索，特征绑定和过滤不需要的信息。枕中这些认知操作的潜在神经相关性在很大程度上尚不清楚。拟议的项目旨在确定枕在视觉注意力中的作用。核心假设是枕是一个大规模网络的一个组成部分，介导的行为相关信息的选择，它的运作协调活动在皮层区域。 通过使用集成的多模态方法，包括功能磁共振成像（fMRI），扩散张量成像（DTI）和人类和猴子的行为测量，以及猴子的侵入性电生理学，我们将通过追求两个主要目标来探索这些想法：（一）确定枕垫的时间动态特征-皮质相互作用，同时记录从相互连接的地区，猕猴枕和皮质的动物训练，以执行空间注意力的任务和（ii）表征大，人类枕的规模功能组织，这在很大程度上是未知的大脑领域，其注意力功能相对于皮层注意力网络。这项研究的意义在于，它将有助于更好地理解枕在一个基本的认知过程中的作用。 操作，选择性注意，其损害对人类健康具有破坏性后果。注意力缺陷经常在神经系统疾病（例如中风后）中观察到，导致视觉空间忽视，将注意力引导到对侧视觉空间的障碍，以及精神疾病（例如精神分裂症）。我们的研究还旨在根据行为背景来确定枕在整合来自不同皮层区域的信息中的作用，这将有助于解决认知神经科学中的一个深层谜团，即理解丘脑-皮层相互作用在感知和认知中的功能。!

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The pulvinar is the largest nucleus in the primate thalamus and is considered a higher-order thalamic nucleus because it forms input-output loops almost exclusively with the cortex. From an anatomical perspective, the pulvinar is ideally positioned to regulate the transmission of information to the cortex and between cortical areas to influence perceptual and cognitive processes. However, experimental evidence in support of such a functional role has been sparse. The most compelling evidence for the pulvinar playing an important role in visual perception and cognition has come from lesion studies in humans and monkeys. These studies point to the critical involvement of the pulvinar in a number of fundamental cognitive functions, including orienting responses and the exploration of visual space, feature binding, and the filtering of unwanted information. The underlying neural correlates of these cognitive operations in the pulvinar are largely unclear. The proposed project aims at defining the role of the pulvinar in visual attention. The central hypothesis is that the pulvinar is an integral subcortical part of a large-scale network mediating the selection of behaviorally relevant information and that it operates by co-ordinating activity in cortical areas. By using an integrated multi-modal methods approach that includes functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and behavioral measures in humans and monkeys, and invasive electrophysiology in monkeys we will probe these ideas by pursuing two main aims: (i) to characterize the temporal dynamics of pulvino-cortical interactions by simultaneously recording from interconnected areas in macaque pulvinar and cortex in animals trained to perform a spatial attention task and (ii) to characterize the large-scale functional organization of the human pulvinar, which is largely uncharted brain territory, and its attention functions relative to cortical attention networks. The significance of the proposed research is that it will contribute to a better understanding of the pulvinar's role in a fundamental cognitive operation, selective attention, the impairment of which has devastating consequences on human health. Attentional deficits are frequently observed in neurological diseases (e.g. after stroke) leading to visuo-spatial neglect, an impairment in directing attention to contralesional visual space, as well as in psychiatric diseases (e.g. schizophrenia). Our proposed studies also aim at defining the pulvinar's role in integrating information from different cortical areas according to the behavioral context, which will help solve one of the deep mysteries in cognitive neuroscience, that is, to understand the functions of thalamo-cortical interactions in perception and cognition. !