Representational drift and learning-induced stabilization in the piriform cortex.

ABSTRACT: The brain encodes external stimuli through patterns of neural activity, forming internal representations of the world. Increasing experimental evidence showed that neural representations for a specific stimulus can change over time in a phenomenon called "representational drift" (RD). However, the underlying mechanisms for this widespread phenomenon remain poorly understood. Here, we study RD in the piriform cortex of the olfactory system with a realistic neural network model that incorporates two general mechanisms for synaptic weight dynamics operating at two well-separated timescales: spontaneous multiplicative fluctuations on a scale of days and spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) effects on a scale of seconds. We show that the slow multiplicative fluctuations in synaptic sizes, w

SUBMITTER: Morales GB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12304901 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature