Jorge Jaramillo

Engagement of the thalamic reticular nucleus in decision confidence computations

Computational modeling of brain mechanisms of cognition has largely focused on the cortex, but recent experiments have shown that higher-order nuclei of the thalamus participate in major cognitive functions and are implicated in psychiatric disorders. In this computational study, we focus on the macaque pulvinar to show that corticopulvinar projections that engage the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) - a sheet of inhibitory neurons surrounding the thalamus - enable the pulvinar to estimate decision confidence. This computation depends on both excitatory and inhibitory plasticity of the corticopulvinar projections. Overall, our model suggests that the TRN is an important and understudied component of the distributed circuitry involved in decision making and possibly other cognitive computations.