ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2015
A critical role for the anterior thalamus in directing attention to task-relevant stimuli.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed.
- Deficits in episodic memory and executive functions in relation to CB1 receptor availability in Parkinson's disease.Journal of Parkinson's disease · 2026Article
- Thalamocortical orchestration of human theory of mind.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Diffusion-Informed Joint Segmentation Enhances Detection of Thalamic Atrophy in Parkinson's Disease.Brain topography · 2026Article
- Anxiety, stress, and affective modulation on object-location memory: A systematic review in virtual environments.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Subcortical gray matter aging and attentional control in amateur musicians and nonmusicians.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Functional connectivity of thalamic nuclei during sensorimotor task-based fMRI at 9.4 Tesla.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Article
- Subcortical Aphasia: An Update.Current neurology and neuroscience reports · 2024Review
- Human thalamic low-frequency oscillations correlate with expected value and outcomes during reinforcement learning.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Adolescent female valproic acid rats have impaired extra-dimensional shifts of attention and enlarged anterior cingulate cortices.Brain research · 2023Article
- Thalamocortical contributions to working memory processes during the n-back task.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2023Article
- Anterior thalamic nuclei: A critical substrate for non-spatial paired-associate memory in rats.The European journal of neuroscience · 2022Article
- Time to retire the serial Papez circuit: Implications for space, memory, and attention.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2022Review
- The anterior thalamic nuclei: core components of a tripartite episodic memory system.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2022Review
- Subcortical Cognition: The Fruit Below the Rind.Annual review of neuroscience · 2022Review
- Medial prefrontal cortex and anteromedial thalamus interaction regulates goal-directed behavior and dopaminergic neuron activity.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Regional Topological Aberrances of White Matter- and Gray Matter-Based Functional Networks for Attention Processing May Foster Traumatic Brain Injury-Related Attention Deficits in Adults.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- Neural activity in the human anterior thalamus during natural vision.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- The anterior thalamic nuclei and cognition: A role beyond space?Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Review
- Thalamocortical excitability modulation guides human perception under uncertainty.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Chemogenetics Reveal an Anterior Cingulate-Thalamic Pathway for Attending to Task-Relevant Information.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2021Article
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Abstract
The prefrontal cortex mediates adaption to changing environmental contingencies. The anterior thalamic nuclei, which are closely interconnected with the prefrontal cortex, are important for rodent spatial memory, but their potential role in executive function has received scant attention. The current study examined whether the anterior thalamic nuclei are involved in attentional processes akin to those of prefrontal regions. Remarkably, the results repeatedly revealed attentional properties opposite to those of the prefrontal cortex. Two separate cohorts of rats with anterior thalamic lesions were tested on an attentional set-shifting paradigm that measures not only the ability of stimuli dimensions that reliably predict reinforcement to gain attention ("intradimensional shift"), but also their ability to shift attention to another stimulus dimension when contingencies change ("extradimensional shift"). In stark contrast to the effects of prefrontal damage, anterior thalamic lesions impaired intradimensional shifts but facilitated extradimensional shifts. Anterior thalamic lesion animals were slower to acquire discriminations based on the currently relevant stimulus dimension but acquired discriminations involving previously irrelevant stimulus dimensions more rapidly than controls. Subsequent tests revealed that the critical determinant of whether anterior thalamic lesions facilitate extradimensional shifts is the degree to which the stimulus dimension has been established as an unreliable predictor of reinforcement over preceding trials. This pattern of performance reveals that the anterior thalamic nuclei are vital for attending to those stimuli that are the best predictors of reward. In their absence, unreliable predictors of reward usurp attentional control.
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