Numerical results of the maximal mutual information for different configurations of ON and OFF cells allowing overlap, as well as enforcing overlap, for populations of up to ten cells.

The mutual information was computed numerically (in bits) upon finding the optimal threshold configuration where all possible overlap scenarios were considered, and compared to the analytically computed value for non-overlapping cells (Eq 1). The specified ON-OFF configurations denote the optimal sequence of ON (‘N’ symbol) and OFF (‘F’ symbol) thresholds. We consider three different noise levels denoted by R.