Coordinated Drift of Image Representations in Human EEG

Image-evoked EEG response patterns in THINGS-EEG2 drift across recording sessions, with drift coordinated across channels and concentrated along identity-encoding dimensions.

• Why it matters: Sensory representations are known to drift in animals, but human evidence is limited, and it is unclear how perception stays stable despite representational drift.
• What they did: Using THINGS-EEG2’s multiple sessions of repeated natural-image presentations, the study tested whether EEG responses drift and whether drift is geometrically constrained, including simulations of Hebbian adaptation.
• The result: Cross-session decoding accuracy was impaired on average with heterogeneous effects across image pairs, while global distance statistics and response-space dimensionality were preserved, enabling faster adaptation under structured drift.