Fig. 6: Overview of the dynamics of neural timescales.

A The hierarchical organization of cortical neural timescales across species and modalities. Unconstrained monkey LFP: the task-free hierarchy of neural timescales (see Fig. 3A). Chaired monkey ECOG: the hierarchy of neural timescales estimated from monkey ECoG data as reported in Gao et al., 2020. Monkey spiking: the hierarchy of neural timescales estimated from neuronal spiking across studies (see Fig. 1A). The error bars represent ±s.e.m. across studies. Monkey fMRI: the hierarchy of neural timescales estimated from monkey fMRI data as reported in Manea et al., 2022. Human LFP: the hierarchy of neural timescales estimated from human LFP data as reported in Gao et al., 2020. Rodent calcium imaging: the hierarchy of neural timescales estimated from rodent calcium imaging data as reported in Pinto et al., 2022. B Global and event-specific changes in neural timescales. We estimated the effect size of the separation between areas’ change from baseline by calculating the rank-biserial correlation for each statistical test in Fig. 4. We use the average effect size at each time point as an index of the differentiation between areas, with low values reflecting a global change in neural timescales (i.e., most areas displayed the same level of change), and high values reflecting area-specific changes (i.e., most areas were statistically different from each other). Y-axis: the average rank-biserial correlation ± s.e.m. across multiple comparisons (i.e., 28 comparisons per time point). X-axis: time point before and after the lever presses, with the colors indicating the associated statistical table in Fig. 4. Circles: mean across statistical tests ± s.e.m (N = 28). C Overview of the before-after differences across events with seemingly similar motor and reward properties, but different abstract meanings. The figure depicts the general effects as observed across areas. For the first lever press, neural timescales decrease after the event. For the final lever presses, neural timescales increase after the event. For the leave lever presses, we observe the same effect. For stay lever presses, there are no significant changes in the before-after change in neural timescales. Circles: changes after the event. Squares: changes before the event. Red: statistically significant before-after changes across all areas. OFC orbitofrontal cortex, VLPFC ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, DLPFC dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, ACC anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), FEF frontal eye fields FEF, PM premotor cortex, SMA supplementary motor area. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.