A thalamus-brainstem attractor network drives history-biased decisions.

Abstract

Natural environments often change gradually, making it adaptive to bias decisions on the basis of the recent past - a phenomenon known as serial dependence^1-3. Large-scale recordings during behaviour have identified that serial dependence is a common motif for decision-making, with neural representations of past experiences found throughout the brain^4-11. However, it remains unclear whether this bias arises from dedicated neural circuits with history-specific computations. Using whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging in zebrafish performing memory-guided evasive manoeuvres^12-14, we identified a hierarchical circuit that maintains past information and biases future choices. Discrete attractors in the dorsal thalamus encoded the position of the most recent obstacle, maintaining a categorical memory via persistent activity lasting 10-20 s. Optogenetic manipulation of the dorsal thalamus abolished or imposed serial bias. A downstream hindbrain integrator received input from the thalamus and combined it with current sensory cues to produce graded responses reflecting multi-trial history. Leveraging a comprehensive brain atlas in zebrafish¹⁵, we constructed a whole-brain computational model that recapitulated behaviour and also predicted a key role for heterogeneous inhibitory subtypes in enabling flexible state transitions. This attractor-integrator architecture reveals a hierarchical and modular computation that unifies robust memory retention with flexible sensory integration, providing a general principle for history-biased decisions.