Fig. 1.

Learning-phase task design and behavioral results. a Learning-phase maze trial structure. Across eight unique maze sequences, participants learned which action to make in state 1 in order to receive a deterministic reward at the end of the maze. Participants made a left or right choice in the first state and then proceeded through instructed left or right choices in state 2 and state 3, followed by reward or loss in the feedback state. Maze-unique stimuli from three categories (faces, scenes, and objects) were presented in state 1 and state 3. The delay between state 1 and state 3 was on average greater than 30 s, while repetitions of unique mazes were separated by at least 4 min. Critical decoding analyses focused on representations of information about state 3 at the onset of state 1 (represented by “Decoding” in the blue box). b Mean learning-phase performance across four repetitions of each maze. Half of initial repetitions ended in reward and half in loss, and the resulting mean 50% level of performance is indicated by the open square at repetition 1. Error bars represent standard error of the mean. c Illustration of the participant’s screen view, a cartoon room with potential left and right door options followed by a path through a hallway between states. In state 2 and state 3, the instructed choice was indicated by a shift in the central stimulus to the instructed door. A localizer phase, which was used to derive classifiers for faces, scenes, and objects, followed the learning phase