To test the thalamocotical hypothesis, we computed the Pearson’s correlation between the mean time series extracted from 68 ROIs in each layer with the mean time series extracted from the entire thalamus. For testing the specific VPL ↔ S1 connectivity hypothesis, the Pearson’s correlation between the mean time series from primary somatosensory cortex (S1) and the VPL were computed. For testing the cortico-cortical hypothesis, we estimated the mean inter-hemispheric correlations only between homologous regions in each layer. The functional connectivity pattern for thalamo-cortical connections showed that the mean Pearson’s correlation between layer I and the entire thalamus was strongest across the cortex (Fig. 4a), and was significantly (FDR corrected p < 0.05) greater than the correlation between the thalamus and layers II–VI. Although layer IV showed a trend to be more strongly connected to the thalamus, it did not reach significance. In contrast, VPL ↔ S1 connectivity was significantly stronger in layer IV than in layers I, V, and VI (Fig. 4b). We then examined the inter-hemispheric cortico-cortical connections for all 68 cortical regions for each layer (i.e., between the
