Although other studies have documented “representational drift” in neurons in the parts of the brain associated with odor and spatial memory, this result is surprising because neural activity in the primary visual cortex is thought to be relatively stable.
The study published Aug. 27 in Nature Communications was led by Ji Xia, PhD, a recent PhD graduate of the laboratory of Ralf Wessel, PhD, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences. Xia is now a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.
“We know that the brain is a flexible structure because we expect the neural activity in the brain to change over days when we learn, or when we gain experience — even as adults,” Xia said. “What is somewhat unexpected is that even when there is no learning, or no experience changes, neural activity still changes across days in different brain areas.”
Researchers in Wessel’s group explore sensory information processing in the brain. Working with collaborators, they use novel data analysis to address questions of dynamics and computation in neural circuits of the visual cortex of the brain.