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J Neurophysiol (May 12, 2004). doi:10.1152/jn.00995.2003
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Submitted on October 15, 2003
Accepted on April 27, 2004

Neuronal Activity Throughout the Primate Mediodorsal Nucleus of the Thalamus during Oculomotor Delayed-Responses II Activity Encoding Visual versus Motor Signal

Yumiko Watanabe1 and Shintaro Funahashi1*

1 Department of Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences, Kyoto University Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto, Kyoto, Japan

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: h50400{at}sakura.kudpc.kyoto-u.ac.jp.

We collected single-neuron activity from the mediodorsal (MD) nucleus of the thalamus, examined the information that was represented by task-related activity during performance of a spatial working memory task, and compared the present results with those obtained in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). We used two oculomotor delayed-response (ODR) tasks. In the ordinary ODR task, monkeys were required to make a memory-guided saccade to the location where a visual cue had been presented 3 s previously, whereas in the rotatory ODR task, they were required to make a memory-guided saccade 90 deg clockwise from the cue direction. By comparing the best directions of the same task-related activity between the two tasks, we could determine whether this activity represented the cue location or the saccade direction. All cue-period activity represented the cue location. In contrast, 56% of delay-period activity represented the cue location and 41% represented the saccade direction. Almost all response-period activity represented the saccade direction. These results indicate that task-related MD activity represents either visual or motor information, suggesting that the MD participates in sensory-to-motor information processing. However, a greater proportion of delay- and response-period activities represented the saccade direction in the MD than in the DLPFC, indicating that more MD neurons participate in prospective information processing than DLPFC neurons. These results suggest that, although functional interactions between the MD and DLPFC are crucial to cognitive functions such as working memory, there is a difference in how the MD and DLPFC participate in these functions.




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