Stimulus-dependent representational drift in primary visual cortex

To produce consistent sensory perception, neurons must maintain stable
representations of sensory input. However, neurons in many regions exhibit
progressive drift across days. Longitudinal studies have found stable
responses to artificial stimuli across sessions in visual areas, but it is
unclear whether this stability extends to naturalistic stimuli. We
performed chronic 2-photon imaging of mouse V1 populations to directly
compare the representational stability of artificial versus naturalistic
visual stimuli over weeks. Responses to gratings were highly stable across
sessions. However, neural responses to naturalistic movies exhibited
progressive representational drift across sessions. Differential drift was
present across cortical layers, in inhibitory interneurons, and could not
be explained by differential response strength or higher order stimulus
statistics. However, representational drift was accompanied by similar
differential changes in local population correlation structure. These
results suggest representational stability in V1 is stimulus-dependent and
may relate to differences in preexisting circuit architecture of co-tuned
neurons.