In our paper (Fig. 4e), we introduce a mechanism of multiple orientation tuning that plays a crucial role in processing complexity. Additionally, our experiment (**Table 1**) on PCs' preferred adjusted acute angles suggests that PCs can detect more complex junctions, such as T- and L-junctions, due to their broad tuning. This is likely because of the differences in local connectivity within and between iso-orientation domains. We appreciate the reviewer's valuable feedback and have conducted an ablation study by disrupting local connectivity and shuffling the spatial positions of different orientation-tuning receptive fields in the trained pinwheel orientation map while keeping other properties constant (**Table 2**). This study supports the conclusion that structured connectivity, as a supplement to Fig. 4e, is the underlying mechanism for the enhanced saliency detection by pinwheels.


Table 2: Ablation study on local connectivity and orientation-tuning receptive fields (available in anonymous Github).

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| Latency (ms) | 1            |       2       |        3      |       4       |       5       |       6       |      7        |
|--------------|--------------|---------------|---------------|---------------|---------------|---------------|---------------|
|Control group | 0.915 ± 0.049 | 0.950 ± 0.170 | 0.899 ± 0.259 | 0.468 ± 0.214 | 0.462 ± 0.202 | 0.491 ± 0.173 | 0.491 ± 0.235 |
| Interchange feedforward connection (FF)| 0.948 ± 0.070 | 0.897 ± 0.222 | 0.889 ± 0.226 | 0.558 ± 0.208 | 0.503 ± 0.159 | 0.486 ± 0.158 | 0.464 ± 0.253 |
|Shuffle lateral connections| 0.959 ± 0.288 | 0.916 ± 0.208 | 0.909 ± 0.262 | 0.500 ± 0.205 | 0.947 ± 0.270 | 0.874 ± 0.194 | 0.501 ± 0.264 |
|Interchange FF, shuffle lateral connections| 0.866 ± 0.221 | 0.904 ± 0.186 | 0.524 ± 0.181 | 0.907 ± 0.200 | 0.626 ± 0.229 | 0.492 ± 0.184 | 0.738 ± 0.268 |
|Shuffle all FF| 0.893 ± 0.073 | 0.937 ± 0.193 | 0.816 ± 0.093 | 0.783 ± 0.151 | 0.820 ± 0.029 | 0.905 ± 0.126 | 0.837 ± 0.184 |
|Shuffle all connections| 0.849 ± 0.101 | 0.875 ± 0.100 | 0.888 ± 0.136 | 0.821 ± 0.125 | 0.818 ± 0.119 | 0.699 ± 0.140 | 0.767 ± 0.098 |

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Thanks for taking the time to review our paper!
