Functions of the thalamus in perception and cognition

描述(申请人提供)：枕核是灵长类丘脑中最大的核，被认为是更高阶的丘脑核，因为它几乎完全与皮质形成输入-输出环路。从解剖学的角度来看，枕骨是调节信息传输到大脑皮层和大脑皮层区域之间影响知觉和认知过程的理想位置。然而，支持这种功能作用的实验证据一直很少。枕骨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对人类和猴子的损伤研究。这些研究指出，枕骨参与了许多基本的认知功能，包括定向反应和探索视觉空间、特征绑定和过滤不想要的信息。枕骨中这些认知操作的潜在神经关联在很大程度上尚不清楚。拟议的项目旨在确定枕骨在视觉注意中的作用。中心假设是，枕骨是一个大型网络的皮质下的组成部分，调节行为相关信息的选择，它通过大脑皮层区域的协调活动来运作。 通过使用集成的多模式方法，包括功能磁共振成像(FMRI)、扩散张量成像(DTI)和对人和猴子的行为测量，以及对猴子的有创电生理学，我们将通过追求两个主要目标来探索这些想法：(1)通过同时记录猕猴枕区和皮层的相互连接区域的时间动力学，描述猕猴枕区和皮质的相互作用的时间动力学；(2)表征人类枕骨的大规模功能组织(这在很大程度上是未知的大脑领域)及其与皮质注意网络相关的注意功能。这项拟议的研究的意义在于，它将有助于更好地理解枕骨在基础认知中的作用 行动，选择性注意，其损害对人类健康具有毁灭性的后果。注意缺陷常见于神经系统疾病(如中风后)，导致视觉空间忽视，这是一种将注意力引向对侧视觉空间的障碍，也可见于精神疾病(如精神分裂症)。我们提出的研究还旨在根据行为背景确定枕叶在整合不同皮质区域信息方面的作用，这将有助于解决认知神经科学中的一个深层次谜团，即了解丘脑-皮质相互作用在感知和认知中的功能。好了！

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. !