How stable memories survive drifting neural representations
In plain words
Recordings over weeks show that the neurons responding to a given place or task keep changing, while the animal's behavior stays the same. How the brain reads a stable meaning from a code that keeps changing is unknown.
Precise statement
In mouse hippocampus and posterior parietal cortex, single-neuron tuning reorganizes over days to weeks at constant behavior (Ziv and co-workers, 2013; Driscoll and co-workers, 2017). Determine the mechanism that keeps the readout stable: drift confined to directions that the readout ignores, continual relearning by downstream circuits, or conserved population geometry; predict the drift rate and its geometry from measured synaptic turnover and plasticity statistics.
What would settle it
Chronic recordings of a population and its downstream target, with measured synaptic turnover, showing which model predicts the drift statistics and the stability of decoded behavior.