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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2020 Feb 5.
Published in final edited form as: Nat Neurosci. 2019 Jun 3;22(7):1110–1121. doi: 10.1038/s41593-019-0408-1

Fig. 4. Acquisition of associative responses is gradual and not sudden.

Fig. 4

a. The CS+ trace GLM t score of 3 example neurons over trial blocks (~10 CS+ trials per block) of behavioral acquisition for three example neurons. Visually, it is apparent that these show gradual changes over acquisition. The slope of the best-fit line to these changes was used to quantify neuronal learning. b. The distribution of slopes of CS+ trace response evolution over acquisition for all neurons within a cluster for both OFC-CaMKII and OFC-VTA neurons. Clusters 1, 2, 5 and 6, and cluster 1 and 5 were found to have significant mean slope for the OFC-CaMKII and OFC-VTA neurons, respectively (“learning-related clusters”, see text). c. We tested whether there was sufficient support to claim a sigmoidal (sudden) transition in neural responses across behavioral acquisition. The left panel shows possible shapes for neuronal response evolution that are consistent with a sigmoidal model as opposed to a linear (gradual) model. The right panel shows the percentage of neurons with considerable support for sigmoidal evolution (Methods), showing that very few neurons had response evolution consistent with a sudden transition in responses. CS+ cue onset responses of cluster 1 were also analyzed since these contained associative information (see text).