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Authors & Affiliations
Nitzan Geva,Alon Rubin,Yaniv Ziv
Abstract
Hippocampal place-cell activity is thought to support the formation of a cognitive map that allows the association of an event to its spatial context. It has long been thought that within familiar spatial contexts, such neuronal representations should be stable over time, and that individual place cells should retain their coding properties. However, recent findings have demonstrated that hippocampal codes gradually change over timescales of minutes to weeks. Several studies have suggested that this gradual drift in the ensemble activity patterns of hippocampal neurons could serve as a mechanism for the encoding of the temporal aspect of episodic memory, by linking or separating in memory experienced events based on their temporal proximity. These findings raised several fundamental questions: What are the contributions of the passage of time and the amount of experience to drift in hippocampal representations? To what extent are different aspects of place-code stability affected by time and experience? To address these questions, we used Ca2+ imaging to record CA1 activity in mice that repeatedly explored two familiar environments. The different environments were visited at different intervals (every 2 or 4 days), which allowed distinguishing between the contribution of time and experience to representational drift. We found that time and experience differentially affected distinct aspects of hippocampal place codes: changes in activity rates were mostly affected by time, whereas changes in spatial tuning were mostly affected by experience. Overall, our results demonstrate that the time-driven changes in activity rates are shared across contexts while experience-driven changes in tuning are context-specific. These findings suggest that different biological mechanisms underlie different aspects of representational drift in the hippocampus.