ArticleNature communications2025
Mediodorsal thalamus regulates task uncertainty to enable cognitive flexibility.
Article in Nature communications, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Neuroinflammation-associated thalamocortical functional connectivity and cognition in older adults.Journal of neuroinflammation · 2026Article
- Thalamocortical orchestration of human theory of mind.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Distinct neural oscillations predict individual differences in feedback-guided cognitive flexibility.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Psilocybin selectively rescues cognitive flexibility impairments caused by aberrant prefrontal error signaling.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Dissociable Thalamocortical Circuit Disruptions During Contextual Fear Renewal in PTSD.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Prefrontal modulation of striatal engagement: a hierarchical framework for goal-directed behavior.Communications biology · 2026Review
- The neural basis for uncertainty processing in hierarchical decision making.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Developing algorithmic psychiatry via multi-level spanning computational models.Cell reports. Medicine · 2025Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The mediodorsal (MD) thalamus is a critical partner for the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in cognitive control. Accumulating evidence has shown that the MD regulates task uncertainty in decision making and enhance cognitive flexibility. However, the computational mechanism of this cognitive process remains unclear. Here we trained biologically-constrained computational models to delineate the mechanistic role of MD in context-dependent decision making. We show that the addition of a feedforward MD structure to the recurrent PFC increases robustness to low cueing signal-to-noise ratio, enhances working memory, and enables rapid context switching. Incorporating genetically identified thalamocortical connectivity and interneuron cell types into the model replicates key neurophysiological findings in task-performing animals. Our model reveals computational mechanisms and geometric interpretations of MD in regulating cue uncertainty and context switching to enable cognitive flexibility. Our model makes experimentally testable predictions linking cognitive deficits with disrupted thalamocortical connectivity, prefrontal excitation-inhibition imbalance and dysfunctional inhibitory cell types.
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Registered trials
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