TY - JOUR T1 - Behaviorally emergent hippocampal place maps remain stable during memory recall JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2021.07.08.451449 SP - 2021.07.08.451449 AU - Roland Zemla AU - Jason Moore AU - Jayeeta Basu Y1 - 2021/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/07/09/2021.07.08.451449.abstract N2 - The hippocampus is critical for the formation and recall of episodic memory1, 2. Place cells, hippocampal pyramidal neurons which show location-specific modulation of firing rates during navigation3, 4, together form a map of environmental contingencies that is presumed to serve long-term memory of that environment5, 6. However, recent studies call to question this tenant of the field by demonstrating high levels of representational drift7, 8 in the hippocampal population with respect to the duration of episodic memories in mice. In the present study, we aimed to resolve this fundamental challenge of theories of hippocampal function by examining the formation and stability of the hippocampal representation of an environment as animals experience explicit rule-based learning and memory recall. Leveraging the stability of two-photon calcium imaging, we tracked activity of the same set of CA1 pyramidal neurons during learning in an operant, head-fixed, spatial navigation task. We found that place cells are rapidly recruited into task-dependent spatial maps, resulting in emergence of orthogonal as well as overlapping representations of space. Further, task-selective place cells used a diverse set of remapping strategies to represent changing task demands that accompany learning. We found behavioral performance dependent divergence of spatial maps between trial types occurs during learning. Finally, imaging during remote recall spanning up to 30 days revealed increased stabilization of learnt place cell maps following memory consolidation. Our findings suggest that a subset of place cells is recruited by rule based spatial learning, actively reconfigured to represent task-relevant spatial relationships, and stabilized following successful learning and consolidation.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. ER -