Examples of drink-encoding neurons are plotted in Figure 4A1–A3. As with trial-encoding, neurons displayed heterogeneity in the magnitude and location of drink-encoding. The neurons in Figure 3A1,A3 encoded drinking intent (pre-fluid availability drink-encoding), whereas the neuron in Figure 4A2 encoded drinking only following fluid availability. The neurons in Figure 4A1–A3 displayed differences from one another in the encoding of drinking during/following fluid removal. Collectively, neurons recorded from Wistar rats encoded more information than P rats about drinking/non-drinking trials before alcohol access versus P rats (FDR-corrected rank-sum tests; p < 0.05; Fig. 4B), which may indicate that the mPFC of Wistar rats performed computations associated with subsequent drinking; such as the intention to drink. In contrast, there were little to no differences in drink-encoding across rat populations before water availability (FDR-corrected rank-sum tests; p < 0.05; Fig. 4C).
