Adaptively navigating affordance landscapes: How interactions between the superior colliculus and thalamus coordinate complex, adaptive behaviour.

The thalamus plays a crucial role in higher-order emergent functions of the brain, including working memory, attention and conscious awareness. How this small subcortical structure supports these crucial capacities remains poorly understood. In this manuscript, I argue that the connections between the thalamus and the superior colliculus, along with their topological location within the broader systems-level circuitry of the brain, play a crucial role in shaping complex, adaptive dynamics. Through these connections, the superior colliculus is proposed to mediate conscious awareness of highly-valued sensory phenomena, and hence, to maximise the adaptive nature of subsequent actions engaged by the networks of the ventral tier of the thalamus. This perspective leads to multiple testable predictions that will shape research questions regarding the interactions between distributed systems supported by unique regions within the thalamus.