Changing environmental signals often attract our attention because our brain shows a special tendency, called deviance preference, towards new stimuli. Prof Shi-Gang He’s group from IBP and Prof Ju-Fang He’s group from the Hong-Kong Polytechnic University have investigated the activity of the auditory-visualcomponents of the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN), believed to be the attentional searchlight of the brain for coordinating multiple neuronal processes. They discovered that the reaction of TRN nerve cells to stimulation by repetitive sounds weakens very quickly and is lost, but changes in the frequency of an auditory stimulus cause a strong response. By recording nerve activity they discovered for the first time that fast-adapting TRN neurons exhibit deviance detection. Deviance detection induces a shift in the ‘searchlight’ to direct attention to the stimulus and thus shifts attention. The strong habituation that TRN neurons undergo in response to repetitive stimuli may reduce the impact of redundant environmental stimuli and sharpen contrasts between different stimuli. The TRN thus plays an important role in attention and change perception.

On Sept 6th Nature Neuroscience published a joint paper entitled, “Change detection by thalamic reticular neurons”. The research presented in this paper was reviewed in the Nature China“Recommended Highlights” section, which said that great progress had been made in explaining deviance perception, and that the information provided in this important paper would prove valuable for future research on TRN neurons.

These important results have come from a long-term in-depth collaboration between these two groups. Prof Shi-Gang He’s group mainly focuses on the perception system at the cellular level, while Prof Ju-Fang He’s group mainly focuses on the auditory system, and interactions between the auditory and visual perception modalities. He Ju-Fang has been a Visiting Professor at IBP since 2005 and helped establish a “Joint Laboratory for Visuo-Auditory Integration Research” which has promoted his collaboration with Prof Shi-Gang He. In 2008 the laboratory became the “CAS-Croucher Foundation CAS-Hong-Kong Joint Research Laboratory for Visuo-Auditory Integration”. Both groups have begun looking at the integration of visual and auditory perception using the strengths of both laboratories. Looking at difficult problems in visual and auditory perception from different angles has resulted in some major strides in our understanding of this difficult field, producing results with important value in both neurobiology and medicine.

This fruitful collaboration has seen both groups developing a variety of ways to work together. Both Profs Shi-Gang He and Ju-Fang spend time each year visiting each other’s laboratories in order to set the direction of their research. At the same time research students have been doing exchanges in each laboratory to learn new techniques and take part in research projects. The groups have run joint workshops and conferences in order to facilitate exchange of ideas and overcome problems encountered in their research. For example, the first author of this report, Yu Xiong-Jie is a student at IBP under the joint supervision of Profs Shi-Gang He and Ju-Fang He. While his main experimental work has been completed at IBP, he has been to Hong-Kong many times on study visits.

This collaborative has included work on many related projects which have received support and funding from the National Natural Science Research Fund for Overseas and Hong-Kong Scholars, from the CAS Fund for Key Overseas Collaboration Projects, and the Croucher Foundation, Hong-Kong Research Funding Office and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.