Fig. 4: Emergence and extinction of firing fields within sessions.

a Individual cell examples for field emergences and field extinctions within a session for GCs converting between no field, single-field and multiple-field conditions. Top, scheme of the belt; middle, spike raster plot and color-coded firing rate map; bottom, mean firing rate. b Proportion of GC conversion types for field emergences (black, n = 41 cells) and field extinctions (salmon, n = 21 cells). Proportions are relative to the number of GCs with place fields. c Average in-field firing rate (lines, the mean; shadow, s.e.m) for field emergences (black, n = 125 cells) and field extinctions (salmon, n = 88 cells), after aligning to emergence (or extinction) trials of in-field firing rate vectors. Note that field emergence is relatively instantaneous, as the in-field firing rate reaches an immediate plateau, while field extinction is preceded by a gradual decrease in the in-field firing rate. d Proportion of field emergence (black, n = 53 cells) and field extinction (salmon, n = 30 cells) events as a function of session trials. e Proportion of field emergence (black, n = 125 cells) and field extinction (salmon, n = 88 cells) events as a function of days. f Color-coded representation of in-field firing rate vectors for all place fields on days 1–7 (left) and days 10–20 (right). In-field firing rate vectors are sorted to emphasize field emergences (upper, sorted by trial number for which cumulative sums >20% of vector integrals) and field extinctions (lower, using the same sorting method in the reversed direction). The color scale is the same as that used in (a). g Average in-field firing rate (lines, the mean; shadow, s.e.m) over trials for days 1–7 (blue, n = 241 place fields) and days 10–20 (yellow, n = 161 place fields).