PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Griffiths, Benjamin J.
AU  - Zaehle, Tino
AU  - Repplinger, Stefan
AU  - Schmitt, Friedhelm C.
AU  - Voges, Jürgen
AU  - Hanslmayr, Simon
AU  - Staudigl, Tobias
TI  - Rhythmic interactions between the mediodorsal thalamus and prefrontal cortex precede human visual perception
AID  - 10.1101/2022.02.07.479362
DP  - 2022 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2022.02.07.479362
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/02/07/2022.02.07.479362.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/02/07/2022.02.07.479362.full
AB  - The thalamus is much more than a simple sensory relay. High-order thalamic nuclei, such as the mediodorsal thalamus, exert a profound influence over animal cognition. However, given the difficulty of directly recording from the thalamus in humans, next-to-nothing is known about thalamic and thalamocortical contributions to human cognition. To address this, we analysed simultaneously-recorded thalamic iEEG and whole-head MEG in six patients (four female, two male; plus MEG recordings from twelve healthy controls) as they completed a visual detection task. We observed that the phase of both ongoing mediodorsal thalamic and prefrontal low-frequency activity was predictive of perceptual performance. Critically however, mediodorsal thalamic activity mediated prefrontal contributions to perceptual performance. These results suggest that it is thalamocortical interactions, rather than cortical activity alone, that is predictive of upcoming perceptual performance and, more generally, highlights the importance of accounting for the thalamus when theorising about cortical contributions to human cognition.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.