FIG. 2.

A schematic drawing of the simulation design and tasks. A: the 2 recognition tasks that each simulated population was asked to solve. The tasks are analogous to those tested for the real IT population (cf. Fig. 1A). On the left, the “2-dimensional (2D) stimulus space” is displayed: the y axis shows a dimension of object shape (identity) and the x axis shows a dimension of retinal position, and a point in the space corresponds to the presence of a single visual object at some position (in a scene). One example question for each task is illustrated by a black rectangular region. For these questions, visual scenes that contain a point within the black region should be reported as yes. To approximate the 3 objects and 3 positions used during the collection of the real IT data (Fig. 1A), all scenes were drawn to contain points only within the 9 dotted squares regions (objects A–C; positions X–Z). The tasks are re-displayed on the right in the same format as Fig. 1A. B: the response profile of an example simulated IT unit in the 2D stimulus space. C: an example simulated IT population (i.e., a set of simulated units like that in B but with randomly chosen center positions, see methods for details). Each colored circle indicates 1 unit. The color indicates the strength of spiking response.