Dear Editor,

We again thank the reviewers for their time and efforts in evaluating our work. Reviewer 3’s
remaining concern is addressed below.
Reviewer 3
The Author's have addressed most of my concerns. My only remaining concern is with the
dynamic range score, which consists of the (cue-evoked) dACC - PCC beta. Since the PCC cue-
evoked beta correlates with WMC at r = -0.61 (fig. 4b) and the dynamic range score correlates
with WMC at r = 0.60 (fig. 5b), I fail to see what the dynamic range score is doing that the the
PCC relationship doesn't already show. Mathematically, the cue-evoked dACC betas could be
held constant (e.g., 0 for each participant) and the results would look nearly identical. The
author's argue that keeping the dynamic range score is important as it is piece of evidence
pointing to the role dACC plays in suppression of PCC and how that relates to WMC. However,
given that the reported dynamic range results are consistent with situations where dACC has no
contribution, I fail to see how this should be presented as evidence as dACC's contribution. The
GC analyses are much more convincing. A more informative use of dynamic range is shown in
the plots in fig. 5a as the by-trial plot reveals that better WMC is associated (at least
numerically) with an increase in dACC cue evoked betas in addition to the expected reduction in
PCC cue-evoked betas.

Answer: The reviewer’s point is well taken. The inability of the dynamic range to explain
additional variance of WMC beyond that explained by PCC deactivation alone is clear in our
results. We failed to sufficiently appreciate this point in our previous response to the reviewer’s
concern on the same issue. The revised text that acknowledges this point now reads as follows.

“The difference between dACC activation and PCC deactivation, referred as the dynamic range
49
, was examined next. Plotting the cue evoked beta values of dACC and PCC across trials for
high and low WMC individuals (based on median split) across trials, one observes that high
WMC individuals clearly had higher dynamic range than low WMC individuals, and the higher
dynamic range benefited from both increased dACC activation (beta=2.13 for high WMC group
versus beta=1.33 for low WMC group) and PCC deactivation (beta=-0.61 for high WMC group
versus beta=0.07 for low WMC group) (Figure 5A). Across subjects, as shown in Figure 5B, the
dynamic range (averaged across trials) was positively correlated with WMC (r=0.60; p=0.006).
Comparing Figure 5B with Figure 4B, however, revealed that the magnitude of the two
correlation coefficients was very similar (|r|=0.60 versus |r|=0.61), suggesting that the dynamic
range does not offer additional insight in terms of explaining the variance of WMC beyond PCC
deactivation.”

In the revised manuscript we have decided to keep Figure 5B. First, it is the natural next step
after Figure 5A, which compares two groups of subjects and which the Reviewer likes, to
examine the dynamic range at the individual subject level. Second, we have used this quantity
in the past and attributed a great deal of significance to it, but have not examined it in a careful
way as we have done here. It would be nice to have a published record of this careful
examination.