Making adaptive decisions in complex environments requires appropriately identifying sources of error^1,2. The frontal cortex is critical for adaptive decisions, but its neurons show mixed selectivity to task features³ and their uncertainty estimates⁴, raising the question of how errors are attributed to their most likely causes. Here, by recording neural responses from tree shrews (Tupaia belangeri) performing a hierarchical decision task with rule reversals, we find that the mediodorsal thalamus independently represents cueing and rule uncertainty. This enables the relevant thalamic population to drive prefrontal reconfiguration following a reversal by appropriately attributing errors to an environmental change. Mechanistic dissection of behavioural switching revealed a transthalamic pathway for cingulate cortical error monitoring^5,6 to reconfigure prefrontal executive control⁷. Overall, our work highlights a potential role for the thalamus in demixing cortical signals while providing a low-dimensional pathway for cortico-cortical communication.

在复杂环境中做出适应性决策需要适当识别错误来源^1,2。额叶皮层对于适应性决策至关重要，但它的神经元对任务特征³ （task features） 及其不确定性估计⁴ （uncertainty estimates） 表现出混合选择性，这就提出了一个问题，即错误如何归因于它们最可能的原因。在这里，通过记录树鼩 （Tupaia belangeri） 执行规则反转的分层决策任务的神经反应，我们发现中背丘脑独立地代表提示和规则不确定性。这使得相关的丘脑人群能够通过适当地将误差归因于环境变化来驱动逆转后的前额叶重构。行为转换的机制解剖揭示了扣带回皮质错误监测的经丘脑途径^5,6 以重新配置前额叶执行控制⁷。总体而言，我们的工作强调了丘脑在解混合皮质信号方面的潜在作用，同时为皮质-皮质通信提供了低维通路。