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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 9, 2025

Monocular Visual Deprivation and Ocular Dominance Plasticity Measurement in the Mouse Primary Visual Cortex

Monocular Visual Deprivation and Ocular Dominance Plasticity Measurement in the Mouse Primary Visual Cortex

Published on: February 8, 2020

Sensory experience steers representational drift in mouse visual cortex.

Joel Bauer^1,2,3, Uwe Lewin^4,5, Elizabeth Herbert⁶

¹Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, Martinsried, Germany. joel.bauer@ucl.ac.uk.

Nature Communications

|October 23, 2024

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Neuronal representations gradually change, a phenomenon called representational drift. This study shows that while synaptic volatility drives drift, visual experience guides its direction, allowing the brain to adapt to its environment.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Computational Neuroscience
Systems Neuroscience

Background:

Representational drift, the continuous change in neuronal representations, is observed across brain regions.
The causes of representational drift, whether sensory experience-induced synaptic plasticity or intrinsic synaptic volatility, remain unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the mechanisms underlying representational drift in the primary visual cortex.
To determine the relative contributions of synaptic plasticity and intrinsic synaptic volatility to neuronal representational changes.
To explore how sensory experience influences the direction and magnitude of representational drift.

Main Methods:

Chronic two-photon calcium imaging in the primary visual cortex of female mice.
Utilizing cylinder lens goggles to restrict visual input to a narrow range of orientations.
Employing a network model to simulate neuronal dynamics and synaptic plasticity.

Main Results:

Individual neuron preferred stimulus orientation drifts slowly over weeks.
The direction of drift, not its magnitude, is significantly biased by the statistics of visual input.
Network models suggest synaptic volatility is a primary driver of drift, modulated by experience-dependent Hebbian plasticity.

Conclusions:

Synaptic volatility drives representational drift, while experience-driven Hebbian plasticity stabilizes neuronal representations.
Under sensory deprivation, Hebbian mechanisms facilitate adaptation.
Hebbian synaptic plasticity actively steers representational drift to align with environmental statistics.