The thalamus encodes and updates context representations during hierarchical cognitive control
By Xitong Chen, Stephanie C. Leach, Juniper Hollis, Dillan Cellier, Kai Hwang. PLoS Biology, 2024
9 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Cognitive flexibility relies on hierarchically structured task representations that organize task contexts, relevant environmental features, and subordinate decisions. Despite ongoing interest in the human thalamus, its role in cognitive control has been understudied. This study explored thalamic representation and thalamocortical interactions that contribute to hierarchical cognitive control in humans. We found that several thalamic nuclei, including the anterior, mediodorsal, ventrolateral, and pulvinar nuclei, exhibited stronger evoked responses when subjects switch between task contexts. Decoding analysis revealed that thalamic activity encodes task contexts within the hierarchical task representations. To determine how thalamocortical interactions contribute to task representations, we developed a thalamocortical functional interaction model to predict task-related cortical representation. This data-driven model outperformed comparison models, particularly in predicting activity patterns in cortical regions that encode context representations. Collectively, our findings highlight the significant contribution of thalamic activity and thalamocortical interactions for contextually guided hierarchical cognitive control.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Neurology
View Paper: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002937
Citations in the corpus
- Estimating trial-wise modulation of functional connectivity using event-related fMRI (2026, unknown): “The autoregressive coefficient was fixed at 0.17, based on the averaged empirical observations from our previously published fMRI datasets (Chen et al., 2024; Leach et al., 2025).”
- Thalamic volume alterations mediate glymphatic function and cognitive dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease (2026, unknown): “46 Together, these nucleus-specific effects reveal selective cognitive dysfunction rather than global cognitive decline.”
- Cortical functional hierarchy disruption following subcortical stroke (2026, unknown): “By disrupting thalamic relay, lesions may weaken segregation and enhance maladaptive coupling between sensory and association systems [63, 64].”
- Sleep disorders and structural alterations in brain regions linked with motivation: a neuroimaging meta-analysis (2026, unknown): “…alterations may impact coordination across thalamocortical and cortico-subcortical circuits, weakening networks essential for sustained attention 68,70,76,82,83 , action execution 68,69,84–88, Parasomnia-specific convergence was observed in the PCC, a medial limbic structure and key node of the…”
- Hierarchical Reconfiguration of Neurocognitive Task Set Representations Mediates Cognitive Flexibility (2026, unknown): “These data were also published in our previous study (Chen et al., 2024).”
- Frontoparietal Hubs Leverage Probabilistic Representations and Integrated Uncertainty to Guide Cognitive Flexibility (2025, unknown): “To correct for multiple comparisons, we used 3dClustSim with the residuals from a voxel-wise restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimate of an ARMA (1,1) temporal correlation to estimate the minimum cluster size.”