Fig. 1

Relationship of acquired information with both noise and output range. Example of two hypothetical stimuli that produce different but overlapping response distributions (green and blue distributions). The amount of information acquired at different levels of noise (y axis) and with different output ranges (x axis) is indicated by the color bar. The black dashed line in a is a schematic representation of noise (i.e., the standard deviation of the response distributions, green and blue). The square bracket above the response distributions in a indicates the output range (i.e., the maximal difference of the mean values of the response distributions). Increasing the output range b and reducing noise c decrease the overlap (uncertainty) between response distributions observed in a. d Acquired information is largest (maximal) when noise is minimized and the output range is maximized