Representational drift in primary olfactory cortex
By C. Schoonover, Sarah N Ohashi, R. Axel, Andrew J. P. Fink. 2020
260 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Perceptual constancy requires the brain to maintain a stable representation of sensory input. In the olfactory system, activity in primary olfactory cortex (piriform cortex) is thought to determine odour identity1–5. Here we present the results of electrophysiological recordings of single units maintained over weeks to examine the stability of odour-evoked responses in mouse piriform cortex. Although activity in piriform cortex could be used to discriminate between odorants at any moment in time, odour-evoked responses drifted over periods of days to weeks. The performance of a linear classifier trained on the first recording day approached chance levels after 32 days. Fear conditioning did not stabilize odour-evoked responses. Daily exposure to the same odorant slowed the rate of drift, but when exposure was halted the rate increased again. This demonstration of continuous drift poses the question of the role of piriform cortex in odour perception. This instability might reflect the unstructured connectivity of piriform cortex6–12, and may be a property of other unstructured cortices. All odours elicit a unique pattern of neuronal activity in primary olfactory cortex but these patterns drift over time, posing a problem for the perceptual constancy of odours.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Sensory Systems
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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
Citations in the corpus
- Natural continual learning: success is a journey, not (just) a destination (2021, background): “…stability of neural representations with some indicating stable representations (Chestek et al., 2007; Dhawale et al., 2017; Katlowitz et al., 2018; Jensen et al., 2021) and others drifting representations (Liberti et al., 2016; Driscoll et al., 2017; Schoonover et al., 2021; Rokni et al., 2007).”
- Neuropixels 2.0: A miniaturized high-density probe for stable, long-term brain recordings (2020, unknown): “Moreover, high-quality signals can be recorded for more than 8 weeks even with relatively rigid and large devices, such as wire tetrodes ( 35 , 36 ), Utah arrays ( 37 , 38 ), traditional silicon probes ( 39 – 41 ), and Neuropixels probes ( 6 , 25 , 42 ).”