Fig. 3: Task activity of ACC-SC neurons.

a ACC-SC neurons were identified by injecting red retrobeads in the superior colliculus (SC; green, GCaMP6s; red, retrobeads). Recordings were made from 303 ACC-SC neurons in five expert mice (eight behavioral sessions, 1–3 sessions per animal). White and red arrows show unlabeled and labeled neurons, respectively. Scale bars: top, 0.5 mm; bottom, 20 µm. Similar labeling was observed in the five mice tested. b Task responses of an example ACC-SC neuron. Color plot on top shows responses on right and left cue trials with contraversive (contra) and ipsiversive (ipsi) actions on individual trials (rows). Trial-averaged neuronal responses (middle) and trial-averaged ball positions (bottom) for the indicated trial types are shown. Vertical dotted lines show stimulus (stim) onset and horizontal dotted lines show ball position of 0. c Session-averaged activity of individual ACC-SC neurons for the indicated trial type. Each row corresponds to the same neuron across the four plots. Dotted line shows stimulus onset. d Average z-scored (z-scr) responses on right and left cue trials with contraversive and ipsiversive actions (right cues, contraversive vs. ipsiversive: p = 0.046, z = −2.00; left cue, contraversive vs. ipsiversive: p = 0.0076, z = −2.69; n = 303 neurons from five mice). *p < 0.05, **p < 0.005, two-tailed Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Box plot conventions are same as Fig. 2g. e Percentage of ACC-SC neurons with a significant difference in response to contraversive vs. ipsiversive actions for right and left cues (n = 303 neurons from five mice). Error bars are 95% binomial confidence intervals. f Classifier accuracy for action decoding with ACC-SC neurons recorded across all sessions. Dotted line shows chance model performance obtained by shuffling trial labels on the test set. Mean classifier accuracy ± the standard deviation over 1000 iterations of the model is shown (n = 8 sessions from 5 mice). g Classifier accuracy for action decoding on individual sessions with ACC-SC and unlabeled neurons (n = 7 sessions from four mice; p = 0.018, z = 2.37). *p < 0.05; two-tailed Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Error bars are mean ± standard error of the mean.