Fig. 2: Multivariate EEG activity pattern dissimilarity between upper and lower tracking trials estimated using Mahalanobis distance.

a Pattern dissimilarity (Mahalanobis distance) of EEG activity aligned by the stimulus onset when the stimulus contrast was 100%. The solid blue and dashed lines are the EEG dissimilarity when the cue was valid and invalid, respectively. A visual stimulus appeared at 0 ms, and global motion occurred at 100 ms. The solid green line (cue-valid condition) and dashed yellow line (cue-invalid condition) show the eye velocity trace distance differences (\(\triangle y\)) from Fig. 1e. The color-shaded areas denote standard errors. A figure at the left illustrates the electrodes used for the analysis. Insets show enlarged EEG dissimilarities. The dark-colored line (valid) and light-colored line (invalid) at the bottom of each plot show the time points where Mahalanobis distance was significantly different from zero (two-sided cluster-based permutation test, n = 14, cluster-defining threshold \(p\) \( < \) \(0.01\), corrected significance level \(p\) \( < \) \(0.01\), 50,000 permutations). b Pattern dissimilarity of EEG activity when the stimulus contrast was 12%. The figure format is the same as in Fig. 2a. c Difference between EEG pattern dissimilarities of valid and invalid conditions. Neural direction discrimination in the cue-valid condition was significantly better than the discrimination in the cue-invalid condition only when stimulus contrast was 12% (96–128 ms). Later, neural direction discrimination was better in the cue-invalid condition than in the cue-valid condition across both stimulus conditions (two-sided cluster-based permutation test, n = 14, cluster-defining threshold \(p\) \( < \) \(0.05\), corrected significance level \(p\) \( < \) \(0.05\), 50000 permutations). The color-shaded areas denote standard errors. The illustration at the left shows the pursuit target direction conditions used for calculating D1 and D2 in Fig. 2c.