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Drifting neuronal representations: Bug or feature?

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Abstract

The brain displays a remarkable ability to sustain stable memories, allowing animals to execute precise behaviors or recall stimulus associations years after they were first learned. Yet, recent long-term recording experiments have revealed that single-neuron representations continuously change over time, contravening the classical assumption that learned features remain static. How do unstable neural codes support robust perception, memories, and actions? Here, we review recent experimental evidence for such representational drift across brain areas, as well as dissections of its functional characteristics and underlying mechanisms. We emphasize theoretical proposals for how drift need not only be a form of noise for which the brain must compensate. Rather, it can emerge from computationally beneficial mechanisms in hierarchical networks performing robust probabilistic computations.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Cengiz Pehlevan and Venkatesh Murthy for support and mentorship. We also thank Matthew Farrell, Michael Goard, Siddharth Jayakumar, and Torben Ott for helpful comments on our manuscript.

Funding

PM was supported by a grant from the Harvard Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative. SQ and JAZ-V were supported by the NIH (1UF1NS111697-01), the Intel Corporation (through the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community), and a Google Faculty Research Award. JAZ-V was also partially supported by the NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical and Statistical Analysis of Biology at Harvard, the Harvard Quantitative Biology Initiative, and the Harvard FAS Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship.

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All authors contributed equally to conceptualization, literature review, and writing. They are listed alphabetically.

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Correspondence to Paul Masset.

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Communicated by Jean-Marc Fellous.

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All authors contributed equally and are listed alphabetically.

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Masset, P., Qin, S. & Zavatone-Veth, J.A. Drifting neuronal representations: Bug or feature?. Biol Cybern 116, 253–266 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00422-021-00916-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00422-021-00916-3

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