A thalamic inhibitory circuit aligns sensory coding with learned value

Adaptive behavior requires sensory systems to prioritize cues that predict meaningful outcomes while suppressing irrelevant stimuli, but how relevance-based filtering is implemented along early sensory pathways remains unclear. Using deep brain two-photon imaging and causal circuit manipulations in mice performing an audiovisual detection task, we show that inhibition from thalamic reticular nucleus dynamically tunes sensory thalamus according to learned value. As animals learned stimulus-outcome associations, neurons in medial geniculate body developed biased responses favoring reward-predicting cues and suppressing non-rewarded stimuli. Silencing inhibitory input from thalamic reticular nu