Extended Data Fig. 12: Neural correlates of licking.

a) Example lick activity for a single session, top trial-averaged, bottom per trial. Animals lick more for correct trials (blue) with a clear rhythm around 10 Hz. Licks were detected using tongue tracking via DLC from side videos. b) Population trajectory distance between correct and incorrect trials for example regions selected manually for visible oscillations, with the number of cells (pooled across sessions) next to the region acronym in the title, aligned to feedback. Right to each panel is the power spectral density of the distance curve, all having a peak around 10 Hz, correlating with licking. c) One example neuron’s activity (pid = ‘3b729602-20d5-4be8-a10e-24bde8fc3092’, region VPL) to show activity is physiological and not an artefact. Left panel, raster per trial with rhythmic 10 Hz activity, also shown in the middle panel by the power spectral density of the raster, averaged across trials. Right panel, waveforms of this neuron across adjacent traces, illustrating that the spikes we counted are physiological rather than being caused by an electrical artefact. Artefacts could arise, for example, from current flowing through the drinking spout into the Neuropixels probe, which would result in all traces having a strong waveform. We exclude saturated segments prior to analysis and after this found no evidence for such artefacts when sampling various neurons and inspecting the waveforms. d) Single-session population trajectory distance for select regions with trial-averaged lick activity in blue on top. E.g. in MRN a clear correlation with licking was found when restricting the analysis to a single session, while much less so when considering the session-averaged results (not shown).