Fig. 4.

Object decoding within and across tasks. (A) Examples of within-task object decoding (Left) and across-task object decoding (Right) averaged across tasks in the pFs. For each individual task, we focused on the 8 × 8 object similarity matrix and calculated within-task object decoding indices by subtracting the average between-object correlations (off-diagonals) from the within-object correlations (diagonal). Across-task object-decoding indices were calculated in a similar manner but focusing on the object similarity matrices comparing object response patterns in two different tasks and averaging across all possible pairwise comparisons of tasks. In this example for the pFs, strong object decoding within task is abolished when comparing across tasks. (B) Within-task object-decoding indices (green bars) and across-task indices (purple bars). Although within- and across-task object-decoding indices were significantly above chance in all ROIs except LPFC, the relative levels of within- and across-task decoding varied. In the EVC and LO, there was no difference in decoding, suggesting task-independent object representations. In contrast, in both the pFs and LPFC across-task decoding was significantly weaker then within-task decoding, suggesting task-dependent object representations. All error bars in this and every other plot indicate the between-subjects SE. *P < 0.05.