Abstract We address the problem of online model adaptation when learning representations from non-stationary data streams. Specifically, we focus here on online dictionary learning (i.e. sparse linear autoencoder), and propose a simple but effective online modelselection approach involving “birth” (addition) and “death” (removal) of hidden units representing dictionary elements, in response to changing inputs; we draw inspiration from the adult neurogenesis phenomenon in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, known to be associated with better adaptation to new environments. Empirical evaluation on real-life datasets (images and text), as well as on synthetic data, demonstrates that the proposed approach can considerably outperform the state-of-art non-adaptive online sparse coding of [Mairal et al., 2009] in the presence of non-stationary data. Moreover, we identify certain dataand model properties associated with such improvements.