Figure 1

Comparing spike count correlations for the ambiguous cylinder and random dot stimulus. (a) Example site (rin_161); recorded activity in response to an ambiguous cylinder stimulus (left; indicated by the purple schemata) and random motion (right, green schemata). Upper two panels: Dots represent trialwise average firing rate (spks/s) of the SU (grey) and MU (black) recorded on the same electrode. Solid lines indicate the running mean computed over 11 trials centred on the current trial. Lower two panels: Scatter plots of SU and MU z-scores for each stimulus. The Pearson correlation between the z-scores gives the rSC (left; rSC = 0.43; right: rSC = 0.29). (b) The rSC values for the random motion stimulus (y-axis) are plotted against the rSC values for the ambiguous cylinder (x-axis) from the same sites. Data points show all sites that were recorded with both stimuli pseudo-randomly interleaved (n = 52). Grey dots show sites that showed strong and matching SU and MU tuning (n = 26 of 52) (see Methods). (c) Bar plot comparing the average rSC between the two stimuli; ambiguous cylinder (purple) and random motion (green). Bright bars show average values for all sites (n = 52); pale bars show average values for sites with strong and matching SU and MU tuning (n = 26 of 52). *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01; t-test on Fisher’s z. Error bars indicate the s.e.m.