Coordinated Representational Drift Across the Mouse Cortex

Abstract

Cortical neurons continuously change their spatial tuning properties over days and weeks, yet how this representational drift is coordinated across distributed cortical networks remains unknown. Using a robotic cranial exoskeleton for chronic widefield calcium imaging with cellular resolution, we tracked over 110,000 unique layer 2/3 neurons across retrosplenial, visual, somatosensory, and motor cortices in mice navigating a figure-8 maze spanning 47 days. Single-neuron spatial tuning properties followed a posterior-to-anterior gradient, with retros-plenial and visual cortices containing the highest proportions of spatially tuned neurons. This was dissociated from local functional coupling, which was strongest in somatosensory cortex. Population activity formed a low-dimensional manifold whose geometry mirrored the structure of the maze. Despite these regional differences, all four regions decorrelated with similar exponential timescales, and session-specific deviations from each regions decay trajectory were correlated across all pairwise region combinations, suggesting that drift was coordinated rather than independent across the dorsal cortex. This coordination persisted after controlling for shared behavioral fluctuations. Furthermore, drift was consistent with an orthogonal transformation of the population code that preserved the geometric relationships between spatial representations across sessions despite continuous drift in single-neuron tuning.