Date: Friday, April 17,  2026
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Location: Simons Center Conference room 46-6011 + Zoom [https://mit.zoom.us/j/96450148811]

Speaker: Lace Riggs,  Ph.D.
Affiliation: Simons Postdoctoral Fellow, Guoping Feng Laboratory, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT

Talk title: State-dependent thalamocingulate synchronization in autism-related anxiety

Abstract: Anxiety-related disorders are the most common psychiatric comorbidity in autism. While pathological anxiety moderates the social, behavioral, and cognitive domains of autism, we lack a mechanistic understanding of how affect shapes higher-order cortical processes. In this talk, I will describe how the thalamus regulates affective-cognitive integration through its connections with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a prefrontal region that shows functional divergence in autism. I found that the anteromedial nucleus of the thalamus (AM) is the principal ascending thalamic input to the ACC and serves as a core regulator of its excitability. Through their reciprocal connectivity, AM and ACC activity becomes strongly potentiated and synchronized during anxiogenic engagement. Thalamocingulate coupling is exaggerated in Shank3 mutant mice that exhibit pathologically-relevant anxiety, due in part to impaired feedforward inhibition within the ACC. Ongoing experiments are exploring the role of AM-ACC synchronization in higher-order cognitive functions, including whether affective dysregulation distorts conflict-based decision-making in the Shank3 model. Together, these findings suggest that AM regulates the temporal precision and contextual sensitivity of the ACC in response to anxiogenic stimuli, thereby shaping ACC-dependent cognitive processes.