Example single neurons, for ODR (A1–A6) and VDD (B1–B6) datasets, highlighting the heterogeneity and temporal dynamics in single-neuron activity in PFC during WM encoding and maintenance. Plotted is the PSTH for each stimulus condition, with trace colors marking the different stimulus conditions corresponding to those shown in the task schematics of Fig. 1. The gray shaded region marks the cue epoch. Purely for visualization of example single-neuron activity in this figure only, PSTHs were smoothed using PCA, which denoises across PSTH traces rather than only over time. For all reported results, activity is not smooth in any way except for binning in 0.25-s time bins.