Thalamic regulation of switching between cortical representations enables cognitive flexibility
By R. Rikhye, Aditya Gilra, Michael M. Halassa. 2018
265 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Interactions between the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and mediodorsal thalamus are critical for cognitive flexibility, yet the underlying computations are unknown. To investigate frontothalamic substrates of cognitive flexibility, we developed a behavioral task in which mice switched between different sets of learned cues that guided attention toward either visual or auditory targets. We found that PFC responses reflected both the individual cues and their meaning as task rules, indicating a hierarchical cue-to-rule transformation. Conversely, mediodorsal thalamus responses reflected the statistical regularity of cue presentation and were required for switching between such experimentally specified cueing contexts. A subset of these thalamic responses sustained context-relevant PFC representations, while another suppressed the context-irrelevant ones. Through modeling and experimental validation, we find that thalamic-mediated suppression may not only reduce PFC representational interference but could also preserve unused cortical traces for future use. Overall, our study provides a computational foundation for thalamic engagement in cognitive flexibility. Rikhye et al. recorded prefrontal and thalamic populations from mice performing attention selection across different contexts. By encoding context, the thalamus both enhances and suppresses prefrontal representations in a context-appropriate manner.
Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience
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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
In Cognitive Neuroscience
- K. Tye
- Ben Tsuda
- Terrence J. Sejnowski
- Hava T. Siegelmann
- Yoshua Bengio
- Laurenz Wiskott
- J. Urgen Schmidhuber
- Scott Makeig
Citations in the corpus
- A modeling framework for adaptive lifelong learning with transfer and savings through gating in the prefrontal cortex (2020, background): “Some studies have provided evidence for such a functional architecture in the brain [27], and prefrontal cortical areas in particular [28],[29],[30].”
- Distinct neural oscillations predict individual differences in feedback-guided cognitive flexibility (2026, unknown): “Research in non-human animals has further shown that the mediodorsal thalamus and its interactions with the PFC are key to enabling cognitive flexibility ( Rikhye et al. 2018; Lam et al. 2025).”
- Distinct neural oscillations predict covert switching between stable and unstable cognitive representations (2025, unknown): “Research in non-human animals has further shown that the mediodorsal thalamus and its interactions with the PFC are key to enabling cognitive flexibility (Lam et al., 2025; Rikhye et al., 2018), especially under task uncertainty (Zhang et al., 2025).”