Data stream mining

Demography

Cognitive psychology

Engineering

Neuroscience

Statistics

Control reconfiguration

Embedded system

Concept drift

Balance (ability)

Developmental psychology

Computer science

Cognitive science

Mechanical engineering

Psychology

Mathematics

Population

Sociology

Artificial intelligence

Limiting

Flexibility (engineering)

Adaptive behavior

Machine learning

Current Opinion in Neurobiology

The nervous system learns new associations while maintaining memories over long periods, exhibiting a balance between flexibility and stability. Recent experiments reveal that neuronal representations of learned sensorimotor tasks continually change over days and weeks, even after animals have achieved expert behavioral performance. How is learned information stored to allow consistent behavior despite ongoing changes in neuronal activity? What functions could ongoing reconfiguration serve? We highlight recent experimental evidence for such representational drift in sensorimotor systems, and discuss how this fits into a framework of distributed population codes. We identify recent theoretical work that suggests computational roles for drift and argue that the recurrent and distributed nature of sensorimotor representations permits drift while limiting disruptive effects. We propose that representational drift may create error signals between interconnected brain regions that can be used to keep neural codes consistent in the presence of continual change. These concepts suggest experimental and theoretical approaches to studying both learning and maintenance of distributed and adaptive population codes.

Causes and consequences of representational drift