Pulvinar

Anatomy

• At the posterior end of the thalamus, above the lateral geniculate body.
• Reciprocally connected with visual and association cortices (parietal, temporal, prefrontal); receives input from the superior colliculus.

Functions

• Orienting visual attention and filtering out distractors.
• Regulating synchrony between cortical areas.
• Superior colliculus–pulvinar–amygdala route: fast, nonconscious processing of threat stimuli.

Clinical

• Contralateral attentional neglect with pulvinar lesions.
• Differences in pulvinar structure and connectivity have been reported in ASD and schizophrenia.

In the model

How this structure is defined in the 3D model, and the data source.

Najdenovska et al. (2018) thalamic nuclei atlas (diffusion MRI clustering; ICBM 2009a symmetric template). Each voxel of the CerebrA thalamus was assigned to the most probable nucleus in these probability maps; because the atlas thalamus is about 20% larger than CerebrA’s, the borders were fitted to the shell (overlap of the two thalami: Dice 0.86–0.89).

References

This substructure’s card draws on the parent structure’s references: Thalamus.