A thalamus-brainstem attractor network drives history-biased decisions - PubMed
4 hours ago
- #Attractor Network
- #Thalamus
- #Serial Dependence
- A thalamus-brainstem attractor network in zebrafish drives serial dependence, where past experiences bias future decisions.
- Whole-brain imaging revealed persistent activity in the dorsal thalamus encoding the position of the last obstacle, acting as a categorical memory lasting 10-20 seconds.
- Optogenetic manipulation of the dorsal thalamus showed it directly controls serial bias, confirming its crucial role.
- A downstream hindbrain integrator combines thalamic memory signals with current sensory cues to produce graded responses reflecting multi-trial history.
- A computational model based on a zebrafish brain atlas predicted heterogeneous inhibitory subtypes enable flexible state transitions.
- The attractor-integrator architecture provides a hierarchical principle unifying robust memory retention with flexible sensory integration for history-biased decisions.