Visual thalamus, “it’s complicated”

Visual thalamus, “it’s complicated”

Molecular organization of the ferret visual thalamus.

The visual system encodes and deciphers information using parallel, anatomically segregated, processing streams. To reveal patterns of gene expression in the visual thalamus correlated with physiological processing streams, we designed a custom ferret cDNA microarray. By isolating specific subregions and layers of the thalamus, we identified a set of transcription factors, including Zic2, Islet...

LRRTM1 underlies synaptic convergence in visual thalamus

It has long been thought that the mammalian visual system is organized into parallel pathways, with incoming visual signals being parsed in the retina based on feature (e.g. color, contrast and motion) and then transmitted to the brain in unmixed, feature-specific channels. To faithfully convey feature-specific information from retina to cortex, thalamic relay cells must receive inputs from onl...

Visual Attention: The Thalamus at the Centre?

New work shows that spatial attention modulates visual responses of single neurons in monkey thalamus, providing empirical support for a long-standing theoretical prediction that specific thalamic nuclei play a key role in controlling the spotlight of visual attention.

Inhibitory circuits for visual processing in thalamus.

Synapses made by local interneurons dominate the intrinsic circuitry of the mammalian visual thalamus and influence all signals traveling from the eye to cortex. Here we draw on physiological and computational analyses of receptive fields in the cat's lateral geniculate nucleus to describe how inhibition helps to enhance selectivity for stimulus features in space and time and to improve the eff...