Fig. 1: The role of vLGN in SC-dependent innate approaching behavior.

a Left, schematic of behavioral test. A moving dot was presented on one of two screens. Right, movement tracks of a naïve animal in a correct (red), incorrect (blue) and no-choice (black) trial. Gray, tracks before the onset of dot stimulation. Gray dash box, initiation zone. b Top, choices of 38 naïve animals in the first two trials (≥5 min apart). Bottom, choices of 23 naïve animals in sham (no dot) trials. c Percentage of success trials. First trial vs. second trial, p = 0.6258; first vs. sham, *p = 0.0362; second vs. sham, **p = 0.0045, two-tailed Fisher exact test. d Impact of stimulus contrast (at 5° dot size) on the success rate. n = 29 mice, ***p = 0.0002, Chi square test. e Impact of dot size (at 100% contrast) on the success rate. n = 57 mice in total, *p = 0.010, two-tailed chi square test. f Left, schematic of chemogenetic silencing of SC. Middle and right, approaching performance for saline and CNO injections in hM4D (n = 12) and mCherry (n = 11) expressing mice. *p = 0.0391, “n.s.”, not significant, two-tailed Fisher exact test. g Left, schematic of optogenetic silencing of vLGN VGAT+ axon terminals in SC. Middle and right, performance for LED-Off and LED-On conditions in NpHR3.0 (n = 15) and GFP (n = 15) expressing mice. ***p = 0.0005, “n.s.”, not significant, p > 0.05, two-tailed Fisher exact test. h Schematic of viral injection for retrograde tracing of SC-targeting neurons. i Left, fluorescence expression at the injection site. Right, retrogradely labeled neurons in vLGN. Scale bar: 500 μm. ZI zona incerta, dLGN dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus. n = 3 animals. j Schematic of viral injection for anterograde tracing of vLGN VGAT+ axons. k Left, fluorescence expression at the injection site. Note that the fluorescence signal in ZI was largely attributed to axons from vLGN. Right, GFP-labeled axons in SC. Scale bar, 500 μm. PAG periaqueductal gray. n = 5 animals. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.