Conceptualizing spatial invariance

The first of these notions comes from the concept of spatial invariance. The researchers noticed that the cat's neural activations to particular patterns would be consistent, regardless of the exact location of the patterns on the screen. Intuitively, the same set of neurons were noted to fire for a given pattern (that is, a line segment), even if the pattern appeared at the top or the bottom of the screen. This showed that the neurons' activations were spatially invariant, meaning that their activations were not dependent on the spatial location of the given patterns.