Effect of equalizing the resting cost on the information-metabolic efficiency.

We observed that the cost of the resting state was different for different recurrence strengths a_rec (Fig 3A–3C). This could potentially explain the higher information-metabolic efficiency E (Eq 10) for intermediate values of a_rec and its decrease for high values of a_rec. To quantify the effect of the resting cost, we set the resting cost in each case to the resting cost of the feedforward network W₀(a_rec = 0). The differences in the cost of the resting state did not have a qualitative effect on the conclusions. A: The same contour plot as in Fig 5B. B: Contour plot with equalized resting costs (contours as in Fig 5B: 0.75, 1.0, 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2.0, and 2.25 bits/s). C: Heatmap of the relative differences.

(TIF)