Representations in human primary visual cortex drift over time
Published in Nature Communications, 2023
Recommended citation: Roth, Z.N., & Merriam, E.P. (2023). "Representations in human primary visual cortex drift over time." Nature Communications. 14, 4422. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-34134-7
Abstract: Primary sensory regions are believed to instantiate stable neural representations, yet a number of recent rodent studies suggest instead that representations drift over time. To test whether sensory representations are stable in human visual cortex, we analyzed a large longitudinal dataset of fMRI responses to images of natural scenes. We fit the fMRI responses using an image-computable encoding model and tested how well the model generalized across sessions. We found systematic changes in model fits that exhibited cumulative drift over many months. Convergent analyses pinpoint changes in neural responsivity as the source of the drift, while population-level representational dissimilarities between visual stimuli were unchanged. These observations suggest that downstream cortical areas may read-out a stable representation, even as representations within V1 exhibit drift.
Recommended citation: Roth, Z.N., & Merriam, E.P. (2023). “Representations in human primary visual cortex drift over time” Nature Communications. 14, 4422.’