Fig 3. Comparison between PC2 and sensory evidence.

(A) Dashed lines show the sensory evidence in easy (blue), ambiguous (green), and misleading trials (red) calculated as the difference between success probability for the right target and 0.5. Shaded ribbons show the mean and 95% confidence interval of PC2 in the same trials (Slow block, Group 1 cells). The first vertical dotted line indicates commitment and the second indicates movement onset, on which all data are aligned. The evidence trace is delayed by 300 ms, which provides the best fit. Note that until the moment of commitment, the pattern of PC2 closely resembles the evidence, except for diverging toward one of the choices even in the absence of evidence during ambiguous trials. (B) The same data, prior to commitment, plotted as evidence versus PC2 in these six trial conditions. The correlation coefficient is R = 0.9234 and p-value is well below 0.001. (C) The distribution (N = 100) of correlation coefficients obtained by performing the same analysis on surrogate data sets generated using the Tensor Maximum Entropy approach (see Methods). Here, each surrogate data set is represented by the highest correlation coefficient of any of the top 10 PCs against the profile of evidence. The mean R is 0.5294 (s.t.d. = 0.1615). For comparison, the red line shows the R value from the real data (panel B), and it is higher than all of the R values from surrogate data (p < 0.01). Data and code available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20805586.