Blue lines and symbols refer to the 400 ms regular stimulus, as in the previous cases; Red and orange lines and symbols refer to two different random samples of 10000 irregular stimuli (two specific realizations are shown in A, the average stimulus is shown in B; for details see text). Black line is catch trial condition (no stimulus). First row (C,F,I): deviation from the spontaneous value of the time-dependent mean readout activity normalized by the spontaneous standard deviation, defined in Eq (13). Second row (D,G,J): deviation from the spontaneous value of the time-dependent standard deviation of the readout activity normalized by the spontaneous standard deviation, defined in Eq (16). Third row (E,H,K): average effect size. Open circles with error bars: experimental data (average over 62 RS cells and 1780 total trials); filled circles of corresponding color: model simulations. First column (C,D,E): IR. Second column (F,G,H): DR. Third column (I,J,K): DNR.