Sensory History Drives Adaptive Neural Geometry in LP/Pulvinar-Prefrontal Cortex Circuits

Prior expectations guide attention and support perceptual filtering for efficient processing during decision-making. Here we show that during a visual discrimination task, mice use prior stimulus history to guide ongoing choices by estimating differences in evidence between consecutive trials (|ΔDir|). The thalamic lateral posterior (LP)/pulvinar nucleus provides robust inputs to the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC), which has been implicated in selective attention and predictive processing, but the function of the LP-ACC projection is unknown. We found that optogenetic manipulations of LP-ACC axons disrupted animals’ ability to effectively estimate and use information across stimulus history, leading to |ΔDir|-dependent biases. Two-photon calcium imaging of LP-ACC axons revealed an engagement-dependent low-dimensional organization of stimuli along a curved manifold. This representation was scaled by |ΔDir| in a manner that emphasized greater deviations from prior evidence. Thus, our work identifies the LP-ACC pathway as essential for selecting and evaluating stimuli relative to prior evidence to guide decisions.