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Updated: Jul 22, 2025
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Monocular Visual Deprivation and Ocular Dominance Plasticity Measurement in the Mouse Primary Visual Cortex
Published on: February 8, 2020
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Representations in human primary visual cortex drift over time
Zvi N Roth1, Elisha P Merriam2
1Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, NIH, Bethesda, MD, USA. zvi.roth@nih.gov.
Nature Communications
|July 21, 2023
Summary
Neural representations in the human visual cortex (V1) drift over time, contrary to prior beliefs of stability. This drift originates from changes in neural responsivity, not representational content.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Science
- Visual Processing
Background:
- Primary sensory regions are traditionally thought to maintain stable neural representations.
- Recent rodent studies challenge this notion, suggesting representations may drift over time.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the stability of sensory representations in the human visual cortex.
- To determine if neural representations in human V1 exhibit temporal drift.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of a large longitudinal dataset of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) responses.
- Fitting fMRI responses using an image-computable encoding model.
- Testing model generalization across different experimental sessions.
Main Results:
- Systematic changes in encoding model fits were observed, indicating cumulative drift over months.
- Convergent analyses identified changes in neural responsivity as the source of this drift.
- Population-level representational dissimilarities remained unchanged, suggesting stable stimulus content.
Conclusions:
- Neural representations within human V1 exhibit cumulative drift over time.
- This drift is attributed to changes in neural responsivity, not alterations in the representational content itself.
- Downstream cortical areas may still access a stable representation despite V1 drift.
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