ArticleNature neuroscience2024
Primate superior colliculus is causally engaged in abstract higher-order cognition.
Article in Nature neuroscience, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Frontal Eye Field Leads a Distributed Oculomotor Circuit for Abstract Categorical Decisions.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Somatosensory cortex shapes perceptual decision bias via the superior colliculus.Research square · 2026Article
- Categorization is 'baked' into the brain.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- The functional organization of retinal input to the mouse superior colliculus.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Human superior colliculus pathways represent the form and motion of looming objects.Cell reports · 2026Article
- Action observation responses in macaque frontal cortex.Neuroimage. Reports · 2026Article
- Attention-related modulation in the superior colliculus encodes perceptual sensitivity, but not perceptual choice.Nature communications · 2026Article
- How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition?Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Sensory reformatting for a working visual memory.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2025Review
- Nonlinear feedback modulation contributes to the optimization of flexible decision-making.eLife · 2025Article
- Efficient and dynamic neural geometry of value and modality encoding in the primate putamen for value-guided behavior.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Distinct neural population code and causal roles of primate caudate nucleus in multimodal decision-making.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Multiplexing of cognitive encoding by oculomotor networks leads to incidental gaze shifts.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Probabilistically constrained vector summation of motion direction in the mouse superior colliculus.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Emergent Aspects of the Integration of Sensory and Motor Functions.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- Observational
- A neural mechanism for terminating decisions.Neuron · 2023Article
- Article
- No evidence for discontinuity between infants and adults.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2023Article
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10 authors.
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Abstract
The superior colliculus is an evolutionarily conserved midbrain region that is thought to mediate spatial orienting, including saccadic eye movements and covert spatial attention. Here, we reveal a role for the superior colliculus in higher-order cognition, independent of its role in spatial orienting. We trained rhesus macaques to perform an abstract visual categorization task that involved neither instructed eye movements nor differences in covert attention. We compared neural activity in the superior colliculus and the posterior parietal cortex, a region previously shown to causally contribute to abstract category decisions. The superior colliculus exhibits robust encoding of learned visual categories, which is stronger than in the posterior parietal cortex and arises at a similar latency in the two areas. Moreover, inactivation of the superior colliculus markedly impaired animals' category decisions. These results demonstrate that the primate superior colliculus mediates abstract, higher-order cognitive processes that have traditionally been attributed to the neocortex.
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