Department of Neurobiology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone, Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, Marseille, France.
Nat Neurosci. 2024 Oct;27(10):1999-2008. doi: 10.1038/s41593-024-01744-x. Epub 2024 Sep 19.
The superior colliculus is an evolutionarily conserved midbrain region that is thought to mediate spatial orienting, including saccadic eye movements and covert spatial attention. Here, we reveal a role for the superior colliculus in higher-order cognition, independent of its role in spatial orienting. We trained rhesus macaques to perform an abstract visual categorization task that involved neither instructed eye movements nor differences in covert attention. We compared neural activity in the superior colliculus and the posterior parietal cortex, a region previously shown to causally contribute to abstract category decisions. The superior colliculus exhibits robust encoding of learned visual categories, which is stronger than in the posterior parietal cortex and arises at a similar latency in the two areas. Moreover, inactivation of the superior colliculus markedly impaired animals' category decisions. These results demonstrate that the primate superior colliculus mediates abstract, higher-order cognitive processes that have traditionally been attributed to the neocortex.
上丘是一个进化上保守的中脑区域，被认为介导空间定向，包括扫视眼动和隐蔽的空间注意。在这里，我们揭示了上丘在高阶认知中的作用，而不依赖于其在空间定向中的作用。我们训练恒河猴执行一个抽象的视觉分类任务，该任务既不涉及指令性眼球运动，也不涉及隐蔽注意力的差异。我们比较了上丘和后顶叶皮层的神经活动，后顶叶皮层是先前被证明对抽象类别决策有因果贡献的区域。上丘对学习的视觉类别表现出强烈的编码，其强度强于后顶叶皮层，并且在两个区域中的潜伏期相似。此外，上丘的失活显著损害了动物的类别决策。这些结果表明，灵长类动物的上丘介导了传统上归因于新皮层的抽象、高阶认知过程。
