Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 502

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 29 of the 29 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Guarding the gateway to cortex with attention in visual thalamus

Open access
McAlonan, Kerry, Cavanaugh, James, Wurtz, Robert H.·2008·Nature
DOI 10.1038/nature07382
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

The massive visual input from the eye to the brain requires selective processing of some visual information at the expense of other information, a process referred to as visual attention. Increases in the responses of visual neurons with attention have been extensively studied along the visual processing streams in monkey cerebral cortex, from primary visual areas to parietal and frontal cortex. Here we show, by recording neurons in attending macaque monkeys (Macaca mulatta), that attention modulates visual signals before they even reach cortex by increasing responses of both magnocellular and parvocellular neurons in the first relay between retina and cortex, the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). At the same time, attention decreases neuronal responses in the adjacent thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN). Crick argued for such modulation of the LGN by observing that it is inhibited by the TRN, and suggested that “if the thalamus is the gateway to the cortex, the reticular complex might be described as the guardian of the gateway”, a reciprocal relationship we now show to be more than just hypothesis. The reciprocal modulation in LGN and TRN appears only during the initial visual response, but the modulation of LGN reappears later in the response, suggesting separate early and late sources of attentional modulation in LGN.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/nature07382

Cites

29 of 29 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 29 references

Cited by

See all 502

Metadata

Authors
McAlonan, K., Cavanaugh, J., & Wurtz, R. H.
Venue
Nature
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
2008-10-05
Volume
456
Issue
7220
Pages
391-394
ISSN
  • 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
  • 1476-4687
DOI
10.1038/nature07382
OpenAlex
W2053014389
Cited by
502
References
29
FWCI
13.15
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Guarding the gateway to cortex with attention in visual thalamus. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/nature07382
The paper
McAlonan, K., Cavanaugh, J., & Wurtz, R. H. (2008). Guarding the gateway to cortex with attention in visual thalamus. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature07382

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.