Fig. 4: Comparison of phase precession strength across different task stages.

a–c, Example hippocampal neuron whose spiking exhibited phase precession during scene recognition and time discrimination, but not encoding. Shown are spike phases as a function of time in unwrapped theta phase, displayed separately for encoding (a; t = 0 is the boundary in boundary clips), scene recognition (b; t = 0 is the image onset) and time discrimination (c; t = 0 is the image onset). The coloured lines indicate the fitted correlation between spike phase and time in unwrapped theta phase. The correlation value and its statistical significance (two-tailed permutation test) are listed above each plot. d, Number of MTL neurons showing significant phase precession during encoding (orange), scene recognition (blue), time discrimination (green) and combinations thereof. e, Difference in phase precession strength between encoding and scene recognition for neurons that show phase precession for encoding and/or scene recognition (that is, the orange plus blue circles in d). f, Difference in phase precession strength between encoding and time discrimination for neurons that showed significant phase precession during encoding and/or time discrimination (that is, the orange plus green circles in d). g, Difference in phase precession strength between scene recognition and time discrimination for neurons that showed significant phase precession during recognition and/or time discrimination (that is, the blue plus green circles in d). Note that in e–g, more negative correlations indicate stronger phase precession. The dashed lines indicate the example hippocampal neuron shown in a–c.