Changes in perceptual sampling contribute to representational drift

Gradual changes in neural response patterns to the same stimulus over time, termed representational drift, have been widely observed across cortical areas. Drift is typically attributed to intrinsic neural dynamics driven by synaptic plasticity or turnover. Here we test a complementary hypothesis that drift arises due to systematic changes in behavior such as shifts in attention or gaze. We conducted a longitudinal eye-tracking experiment in which fourteen adults freely viewed naturalistic images across 6 experimental sessions spanning 2-4 weeks, with a subset of images repeated within and across sessions. For each participant, we quantified the similarity of fixation density maps between se