Remembered reward locations restructure entorhinal spatial maps

Abstract

Ethologically relevant navigational strategies often incorporate remembered reward locations. Although neurons in the medial entorhinal cortex provide a maplike representation of the external spatial world, whether this map integrates information regarding learned reward locations remains unknown. We compared entorhinal coding in rats during a free-foraging task and a spatial memory task. Entorhinal spatial maps restructured to incorporate a learned reward location, which in turn improved positional decoding near this location. This finding indicates that different navigational strategies drive the emergence of discrete entorhinal maps of space and points to a role for entorhinal codes in a diverse range of navigational behaviors.