Data from: Attentional modulation of secondary somatosensory and visual thalamus of mice

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.