Representations in human primary visual cortex drift over time

• Published in: Nature communications 2023-07, Vol.14 (1), p.4422-4422, Article 4422
• Main Authors: Roth, Zvi N., Merriam, Elisha P.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 59/36; 631/378/116/2395; 631/378/2613/1875; Brain Mapping - methods; Drift; Functional magnetic resonance imaging; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Model testing; Monkeys & apes; multidisciplinary; Neurosciences; Primary Visual Cortex; Representations; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Signal to noise ratio; Somatosensory cortex; Time; Visual cortex; Visual Cortex - physiology; Visual observation; Visual Perception - physiology; Visual stimuli
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-40144-w

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. It is unclear whether human visual cortex exhibits representational drift. Here, the authors test the stability of visual representations and find that responsivity drifts over time, yet dissimilarities remain stable, suggesting a neural mechanism to overcome cumulative changes.