As a result, it plays a crucial role in attention, planning, organization, abstract thinking, multi-tasking, and active memory.

[citation needed] The connections of the medial dorsal nucleus have even been used to delineate the prefrontal cortex of the Göttingen minipig brain.

The cells also send axons directly to many parts of the brain, including nuclei of the limbic system such as the lateral nucleus of the amygdala, the anterior cingulate, and the hippocampus.

[citation needed] The medial dorsal nucleus is also presumed to play a role in monitoring internal movements of the eye.

Specifically, its function is to relay the information about how the eyes will be moved (efference copy, also known as corollary discharge) from the superior colliculus to the frontal eye fields (FEF) in order to aid the neurons in FEF to change their receptive fields to where the visual stimuli will appear after the saccade.