Abstract
Low-dimensional dynamics and movement-related activity are found throughout the brain. However, primary visual cortex contains high-dimensional sensory representations, raising the question of how low-dimensional dynamics and high-dimensional representations coexist. Here we approached this question by analyzing neuronal activity during slow-wave sleep, which provided reliable estimates of low-dimensional, internally-generated manifold structure. We found that movements and visual scenes were both encoded in the on-manifold subspace, which accounts for more variance than chance during sleep, but visual scenes were also encoded in the off-manifold subspace, which accounts for less variance than chance during sleep. This off-manifold subspace contains sparse activity in the neurons with the strongest low-dimensional modulation by movement, which paradoxically prevents movementevoked activity from interfering with high-dimensional stimulus representations. These results reveal an unexpected link between low-dimensional dynamics and sparse coding, suggesting that these phenomena play a role in creating and accessing an off-manifold coding space for highdimensional representations.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
