Fig. 1: Diverse yet repeatable response profiles in ALM.
From: Thalamus-driven functional populations in frontal cortex support decision-making
a, Mice reporting the location of a pole by directional licking after a delay epoch. b, Silicon probe recording and example neurons. Left ALM. Top: spike raster. Bottom: PSTH. Blue, ‘lick right’ trials; red, ‘lick left’. Dashed lines, behavioral epochs as in a. c, Analysis of diverse response profiles. Individual neuron PSTHs of ‘lick right’ (blue) and ‘lick red’ trials (red) are concatenated. The population response is reduced to the top 50 principal components and embedded into a two-dimensional t-SNE. Dots, individual neurons. Only neurons showing consistent modulation during the task are included (n = 7,340 neurons, 73 mice). Neurons are divided into 94 clusters. Colors show two clusters. PC, principal component. d, PSTHs of individual neurons in the example clusters in c. e, Rows 1–2: PSTHs (mean ± s.e.m. across neurons) of eight example clusters in the primary dataset. Rows 3–4: PSTHs of matching clusters from a second dataset (n = 8,736 neurons, 29 mice). t-SNE and clustering are performed independently on the second dataset, resulting in 86 clusters. f, Left: response profiles of all clusters from the primary dataset. Each row shows activity of one cluster. Right: response profiles of the second dataset. g, Fraction of neurons falling into each cluster in the primary dataset (thick line). Clusters are ranked based on size. Gray lines, fraction of neurons in four distinct mouse groups (18 mice each; n = 1,628, 2,095, 1,547, 1,984 neurons, respectively). Dots, fraction of neurons in matched clusters from the second dataset. The position of the dots on the x axis is based on the matching cluster from the primary dataset. h, Noise correlation for simultaneously recorded neuron pairs. n = 1,060 pairs from the same cluster (filled symbols); n = 1,598 pairs from different clusters (open symbols) (Methods). Noise correlation is trial-to-trial cofluctuations in the mean-subtracted spike rate. See Extended Data Fig. 1i for noise correlation during specific task epochs. Mean ± s.e.m. across neuron pairs. ***P = 1.82 × 10−49, two-sided Wilcoxon rank sum test, within-cluster pairs versus across-cluster pairs. ‘Lick right’ and ‘lick left’ trials are combined for the test.
