To quantify and compare the amount of information encoded by trial- and drink-encoding neurons over time, information theoretic statistical approaches were used. The goal of these analyses were to capture the amount of information encoded in each neuron about the trial-associated stimuli (trial-encoding) and if the neural firing rates dissociated drinking/non-drinking trials (drink-encoding). Additionally, these analyses focused on drink-encoding that occurred before fluid availability (the 0- to 4.5-s interval), as this time interval was expected to contain cue-elicited encoding of the intention to drink or abstain. In addition to quantifying the amount of information using MI, these analyses captured different encoding strategies (e.g., firing rate increases or decreases) at each time bin during a trial (e.g., encoding during the DS vs encoding during access).
