Extended Data Fig. 5: Temporal dynamic of neural population response.

a, Electrode localization for all recorded animals (n=7), colour-coded for each mouse. cg1/cg2=cingulate areas 1/2; prL=prelimbic cortex; iL=infralimbic cortex. b, Peri-event histogram (PETH) and spike rasters a neuron that displayed a selective change in firing rate for only high vs low competitive success trials. PETHs are aligned to when the recorded animal enters the reward zone. Grey dots represent gate opening (i.e. trial start). c, PETH and spike rasters of a neuron that did not display selective changes in firing rate change. PETHs are aligned to when the recorded animal enters the reward zone. Grey dots represent gate opening. d, Recruitment of ACC neurons over the course of the trials. For each epoch, each Venn diagram depicts the distribution of neurons within the recorded population that responded differentially to the three primary factors that described the animals’ competitive interactions: competitive success (CSS), reward size (REW), and relative hierarchical rank (RR) across all task-relevant epochs. For each main factor, embedded pie charts show the proportion of overlapping cells based on their encoding properties. e, For each epoch, all recorded neurons are highlighted and labelled with colours corresponding to their specific encoding properties on the same t-SNE space as shown in Fig. 2f. Dots represent each recorded neuron (n=1049 from 7 mice). Grey dots represent neurons that displayed no task-related modulation. f, Scatter plots illustrating the absolute difference in neuronal activities per neuron across the three main task conditions. Here, dots represent each recorded neuron (n=1049 from 7 mice) and are colour-coded based on whether they each displayed significant differences in response to relative rank, reward and success. Primary comparisons were made between competitive success vs. reward (*Z=10.8, p=3.4x10^-27; Rank-sum), competitive success vs. relative rank (**Z=7.48, p=7.7x10^-14; Rank-sum) and relative rank vs. reward (***Z=10.29, p=8.14x10^-25; Rank-sum). g, Polar plots illustrating the relative tuning of neurons that responded to differences in the animal’s relative rank, reward size and competitive success. For comparison, polar plots are also provided for neurons that responded to differences in speed (SP); travel distance (TD), social context (SO), mixture of controls (MC) and mixture of all task conditions (M). Polar plot for cells that responded to none of these task features is shown in grey. Dashed boxes represent significance limits for each condition (p<0.01; Kruskal-Wallis with one-sided Holm-Sidak correction for post hoc comparisons). The s.e.m. for each polar plot is given as dashed lines. h, Table displaying the average number of putative neurons and active electrode channels per recorded animal. i, Left, firing rates for neurons recorded from left and right hemispheres (t₁₀₄₇=1.64, p=0.10; two-sided t-test). Right, there was no difference in the encoding proportions for any of the main features of the group competitive foraging task between neurons recorded from the left versus right hemispheres (p>0.05, Chi-square tests). Box-plot edges represent 25^th/75^th percentiles with centre=median and whiskers=1^st-99^th percentile range.

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