Fig. 4: Stability of context representation.

a Relationship of context decoder accuracies in the intertrial interval and during stimulus presentation. Gray dashed line indicates shuffled baseline. Line, R² and p values indicate Pearson-correlation, two-sided Wald-test t-statistics (n = 8 animals). b Accuracy of time-shifted visual (blue) and context (magenta) decoders. Decoder was trained at a reference time point (gray vertical line) at pre-stimuls (left) and on-stimulus (right) periods. Gray dashed line as in (a). c Generalization of the visual decoder across time. Performance (color scale) of decoders trained (vertical axis) and tested (horizontal axis) at different time windows. White shading, decoder performance under shuffled baseline. Inset, a cross section of the main panel. Black line, linear fit characterizing the rate of performance decay. d Smoothed rate of decay at each timepoint in 500-ms windows (thin lines: individual mice, thick line: mean, shading: 2 s.e.m). e Relative angle between the DVs of visual decoders trained at different time windows. f–h Same as c–e but for the context variable. Inset below (f) indicates time-shifted decoder matrix elements for within pre- and on-stimulus periods (yellow) and elements for time-shifts across the border of stimulus onset (red). ‘Blockiness’ = yellow - red. i Context decoder coefficients (color code) at each timepoint for all animals (n = 8) concatenated. Neurons (vertical axis, n = 196) ordered according to mean coefficients during the pre-stimulus period. j Same as i, but ordered according to the on-stimulus period. k Same as f, for a second example animal. l Schematics of the definition of DV nullspace. m Same as k, but context is decoded from the context nullspace. n Time-averaged diagonal context accuracies from the full neural activity space (violet) and from the context nullspace (light pink), depending on the blockiness in the same subspaces. Dots and lines represent individual animals, p-value of two-sided dependent t-test between blockiness from nullspace and full space (n = 5 and m = 5 for 5 animals, left and right triangles correspond to animals on f and k, respectively). Gray dashed line: Mean accuracies above randomized chance averaged over all animals.