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Thalamic control of sensory selection in divided attention | Nature

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The authors trained mice to attend to or suppress vision based on behavioral context and show, through novel and established techniques, that changes in visual gain rely on tunable feedforward inhibition of visual thalamus via innervating thalamic reticular neurons; these findings introduce a subcortical model of attention in which modality-specific thalamic reticular subnetworks mediate top-down and context-dependent control of sensory selection.

Subjects Neural circuits Neurophysiology Thalamus Abstract How the brain selects appropriate sensory inputs and suppresses distractors is unknown. Given the well-established role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in executive function 1 , its interactions with sensory cortical areas during attention have been hypothesized to control sensory selection 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 . To test this idea and, more generally, dissect the circuits underlying sensory selection, we developed a cross-modal divided-attention task in mice that allowed genetic access to this cognitive process. By optogenetically perturbing P

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