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* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: stanford{at}wfubmc.edu.
This study examines the influence of behavioral context on the activity of visuomotor neurons in primate central thalamus. Neurons that combine information about sensory stimuli and their behavioral relevance are thought to contribute to the decision mechanisms that link specific stimuli to specific responses. Previously (Wyder et al., 2003a), we reported that neurons in central thalamus carry spatial information throughout the instructed delay period of a visually-guided delayed saccade task. The goal of the current study was to determine if the delay-period activity of thalamic neurons is modulated by behavioral context. Single neurons were evaluated during performance of visually-guided and memory-guided variants of a saccadic choice task in which a cue designated the response field stimulus as the target of a rewarded saccade or as an irrelevant distracter. The relative influence of the physical stimulus and context on delay-period activity suggested a minimum of 3 neural groups. Some neurons signaled the locations of visible stimuli regardless of behavioral relevance. Other neurons preferentially signaled the locations of current saccadic goals and did so even in the absence of the physical stimulus. A third group signaled only the locations of currently visible saccadic goals. For the latter two groups, activity was the product of both stimulus and context suggesting that central thalamic neurons play a role in the context-dependent linkage of sensory signals and saccadic commands. More generally, these data suggest that the anatomical substrate of sensorimotor decision-making may include the cortico-subcortical loops for which central thalamus serves as the penultimate synapse.
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