Motion integration in a thalamic visual nucleus

Thalamic nuclei have long been regarded as passive relay stations for sensory information en route to higher level processing in the cerebral cortex. Recently, physiological and theoretical studies have reassessed the role of the thalamus and it has been proposed that thalamic nuclei may actively participate with cortical areas in processing specific information1,2,3,4. In support of this idea, we now show that a subset of neurons in an extrageniculate visual nucleus, the lateral-posterior pulvinar complex, can signal the true direction of motion of a plaid pattern, indicating that thalamic cells can integrate different motion signals into a coherent moving percept5,6,7,8. This is the first time that these computations have been found to occur outside the higher-order cortical areas5,6,9,10. Our findings implicate extrageniculate cortico–thalamo–cortical loops in the dynamic processing of image motion, and, more generally, as basic computational modules involved in analysing specific features of complex visual scenes.