Neural correlates of active avoidance behavior in superior colliculus.

Detection of low salience whisker stimuli requires synergy of tectal and thalamic sensory relays.

Detection of a sensory stimulus depends on its psychophysical saliency; the higher the saliency, the easier the detection. But it is not known whether sensory relay nuclei differ in their ability to detect low salient whisker stimuli. We found that reversible lesions of either the somatosensory thalamus or superior colliculus blocked detection of a low salience whisker conditioned stimulus (WCS...

Early sensory pathways for detection of fearful conditioned stimuli: tectal and thalamic relays.

Sensory stimuli acquire significance through learning. A neutral sensory stimulus can become a fearful conditioned stimulus (CS) through conditioning. Here we report that the sensory pathways used to detect the CS depend on the conditioning paradigm. Animals trained to detect an electrical somatosensory stimulus delivered to the whisker pad in an active avoidance task were able to detect this C...

Histological and Biochemical Alterations in the Superior Colliculus and Lateral Geniculate Nucleus of Juvenile Rats Following Prenatal Exposure to Marijuana Smoke

Prenatal exposure to marijuana has been associated with a variety of brain deficits, as Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), its main active ingredient crosses the placenta and affects foetal brain development. Despite this effect, marijuana remains a commonly abused substance among pregnant women. In the current study, we examined the histological and biochemical changes in the superior colliculus (...

Neurophysiol Joo - Hyun Song and Robert M . McPeek movements in superior colliculus Neural correlates of target selection for reaching

Correlates of Capture of Attention and Inhibition of Return across Stages of Visual Processing

How do visual signals evolve from early to late stages in sensory processing? We explored this question by examining two neural correlates of spatial attention. The capture of attention and inhibition of return refer to the initial advantage and subsequent disadvantage to respond to a visual target that follows an irrelevant visual cue at the same location. In the intermediate layers of the sup...