Table 1.

Global summary of reprocessed Letter and Shape results: the p-levels were determined from a permutation test of 1,000 iterations. The percentage of the variance accounted for (%VAF) was computed with respect to the raw data, i.e. prior to any application of a design matrix and prior to the removal of any taskindependent effects. ‘PC set’ indicates which Principal Components were used to construct the load-related patterns. One can appreciate the general relationship between PC-set and variance accounted for: the more PCs were used, the lower the variance accounted for.

Task phase	Ordinal Trend?	p-level	%VAF	PC set
Letter task
STIM	Yes	<0.001	2.5	1-7
RET	Yes	0.001	6.2	1-3
PROBE	Yes	<0.001	2.2	1-8
Shape task
STIM	Yes	0.001	4.2	1-6
RET	Yes	0.006	5.5	1-4
PROBE	No	N/A	N/A	N/A