Long-Term Variability in Visual Processing versus Perceptual Stability

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Psychology

Background:

• The brain exhibits neural plasticity, constantly changing.
• Despite this, our perception of the world remains stable.
• Longitudinal changes in neural responses and their impact on stable perception are not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if brain responses to visual stimuli change over long periods (months).
• To determine if these changes affect higher-level object category representations.
• To test if neural representations for object recognition remain stable over time.

Main Methods:

• Acquired and analyzed magnetoencephalography (MEG) data from one participant over six months.
• Used passive visual stimulus presentation.
• Validated findings with the open-access THINGS-MEG dataset and four additional participants.

Main Results:

• Scanning day was predictable from brain responses, indicating temporal changes in neural activity.
• Object animacy was decodable across different scanning days, even with long time intervals.
• Cross-decoding accuracy remained stable over months, despite between-scanning-day variability.

Conclusions:

• Visual stimulus processing shows variability over long timescales.
• The core neural structure for object recognition is stable and not stimulus-specific.
• The brain maintains stable perceptual representations despite gradual changes in sensory responses.