Attention gates visual coding in the human pulvinar

The pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus is suspected to play an important role in visual attention, based on its widespread connectivity with the visual cortex and the fronto-parietal attention network. However, at present, there remain many hypotheses on the pulvinar’s specific function, with sparse or conflicting evidence for each. Here we characterize how the human pulvinar encodes attended and ignored objects when they appear simultaneously and compete for attentional resources. Using multivoxel pattern analyses on data from two fMRI experiments, we show that attention gates both position and orientation information in the pulvinar: attended objects are encoded with high precision, while there is no measurable encoding of ignored objects. These data support a role of the pulvinar in distractor filtering – suppressing information from competing stimuli in order to isolate behaviorally relevant objects.