Fig. 8. Lesioning recurrent connections from the inhibitory populations with plastic sensory input (Inh_fr and Inh_ff) to the excitatory populations with plastic sensory input (Exc_fr and Exc_ff) results in drastic changes in the behavior of the RNNs.

a The plot shows the time course of explained variance (R²) in RNNs’ estimates based on different models. Error bars represent s.e.m. The solid line is the average of exponential fits to RNNs’ data, and the shaded areas indicate ±s.e.m. of the fit. b Plotted is the average rate of value-dependent changes in the connection weights from feature-encoding, conjunction-encoding, and object-identity encoding populations to recurrent populations with plastic sensory input (indicated by the inset diagrams explained in Fig. 4b), during the simulation of our task. The plus sign indicates one-sided significant rate of change (sign-rank test; P < 0.05), whereas hatched squares indicate connections with rates of change that were not significantly different from zero (two-sided sign-rank test; P > 0.05). Highlighted rectangles in cyan, magenta, and red indicate the values for input from sensory units encoding the informative feature, the informative conjunction, and object-identity, respectively. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.