Topic: task-irrelevant stimuli

Mechanisms of representational drift are still under investigation. Under one set of hypotheses, drift is a result of noisy continual learning in the brain. Previous computational studies have demonstrated that drift could occur under different types of noise such as synaptic noise, or sample stochasticity. However, exact contribution of various noises remains elusive. For example, it’s unclear what’s the contribution of stimuli that are relevant for the task, and the ones that are continually present in the environment but the agent learns to ignore in a context. In this study, using theory a