Attentional modulation of secondary somatosensory and visual thalamus of mice

Abstract

Each sensory modality has its own primary and secondary thalamic nuclei. While the primary thalamic nuclei are well understood to relay sensory information from the periphery to the cortex, the role of secondary sensory nuclei is elusive. One hypothesis has been that secondary nuclei may support feature-based attention. If this is true, one would also expect the activity in different nuclei to reflect the degree to which modalities are or are not behaviorally relevant in a task. We trained head-fixed mice to attend to one sensory modality while ignoring a second modality, namely to attend to touch and ignore vision, or vice versa. Arrays were used to record simultaneously from secondary somatosensory thalamus (POm) and secondary visual thalamus (LP). In mice trained to respond to tactile stimuli and ignore visual stimuli, POm was robustly activated by touch and largely unresponsive to visual stimuli. A different pattern was observed when mice were trained to respond to visual stimuli and ignore touch, with POm now more robustly activated during visual trials. This POm activity was not explained by differences in movements (i.e., whisking, licking, pupil dilation) resulting from the two tasks. Post hoc histological reconstruction of array tracks through POm revealed that subregions varied in their degree of plasticity. LP exhibited similar phenomena. We conclude that behavioral training reshapes activity in secondary thalamic nuclei. Secondary nuclei may respond to behaviorally relevant, reward-predicting stimuli regardless of stimulus modality.