Benchmarking the simulation results.

(a) Log-normal like distribution of firing rates. Top, firing rates of all biophysical cells from three models during spontaneous activity and in response to a drifting grating, averaged over 10 trials. Large red dots are firing rates averaged over all cells in 0.1 Hz bins over the spontaneous activity axis. Bottom, examples of firing rate distributions on a log scale for a single trial. Solid lines indicate log-normal fits of the data. (b) Comparison of the spontaneous rates, maximal rates in response to gratings (Rmax), orientation selectivity index (OSI), and direction selectivity index (DSI) between the simulation (by cell type, color) and experimental measurements using extracellular electrophysiology (gray). Here and in all other box plots, the box bottom and top mark the inter-quartile range (IQR), the median is in red, whiskers mark +/-1.5 IQR; mean and standard deviation are shown in black (see Methods for further details). “An.”–experiments in anesthetized mice, “Aw.”–in awake mice. (c) The local field potential (LFP; see Methods) measured at the center of the L4 model, for a drifting grating. The spectra from 10 trials are shown in gray, and the averaged spectrum is in black. (d) The model PSTH in response to a 50 ms flash (average over all biophysical excitatory cells, all models, and all trials, in 2 ms bins). (e) The magnitude and time-to-peak (from flash onset) for the first and second peaks of the response to the 50 ms flash, for both simulation and electrophysiological data. (f) Distributions of lifetime sparsity of simulated and experimental responses of excitatory neurons, computed for three directions of a grating (0, 45, and 90 degrees) and for three movies. See Methods for details on computing all values presented.