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Updated: Aug 6, 2026
04:43
Visualizing Visual Adaptation
Published on: April 24, 2017
Changes in perceptual sampling contribute to representational drift
Yixin Yuan1, John T Serences1,2, Mikio C Aoi1,3,4
1Neurosciences Graduate Program, UC San Diego.
Biorxiv : the Preprint Server for Biology
|July 17, 2026
Summary
Representational drift, changes in neural responses over time, may be caused by subtle behavioral shifts like attention changes, not just intrinsic neural dynamics. This study shows gaze pattern changes can induce neural representation changes.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Science
- Computational Neuroscience
Background:
- Representational drift, changes in neural response patterns to stimuli over time, is commonly observed in the brain.
- This drift is often attributed to internal neural processes like synaptic plasticity.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if systematic behavioral changes, specifically in attention and gaze, can drive representational drift.
- To test a complementary hypothesis to intrinsic neural dynamics as the cause of drift.
Main Methods:
- A longitudinal eye-tracking experiment with 14 adults viewing naturalistic images over 6 sessions.
- Quantified fixation similarity using Wasserstein distance and analyzed neural network model (CORnet-S) activations.
Main Results:
- Fixation patterns showed increasing dissimilarity with greater temporal separation, indicating behavioral drift.
- Representational distances in a deep neural network model increased with session separation, mirroring behavioral changes.
- These effects were significant across multiple layers of the model (V1, V2, V4, IT).
Conclusions:
- Subtle, systematic shifts in visual scene sampling over time are sufficient to induce representational drift in neural systems.
- Behavioral changes, even minor ones, can drive representational drift, potentially without requiring intrinsic neural reconfigurations.
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