The thalamus is often caricatured as a simple sensory relay, despite ample animal and patient evidence for its involvement in a wide range of cognition and behavior. This oversimplified description has begun to give way to a more sophisticated understanding, starting with increasing attention to the ‘cognitive thalamus’ 48, 65. More recently, the idea of the ‘integrative thalamus’ has developed in an attempt to capture the complexity of thalamic nuclei and their dense connectivity with the rest of the brain 20, 28, 58•. Understanding of the cholinergic system’s role in cognition and behavior has made a similar leap forward. While traditional views described cholinergic activity as spatially and temporally diffuse and primarily involved in ‘state’ regulation, new conceptualizations emphasize temporally and spatially specific activity and its role in integrating bottom-up sensory information with top-down attention and goals 51, 52•, 57, 68.

Both the thalamus and the cholinergic system are strongly implicated in attention. While the classic literature emphasized distinct roles in either top-down (goal-driven) or bottom-up (stimulus-driven), recent developments contribute to new perspectives that emphasize the role of the thalamus and the cholinergic system in coordinating how these functions interact and how we switch between them. We review these developments, focusing on the last 5 years.