TY - JOUR T1 - Flexible coding of memory and space in the primate hippocampus during virtual navigation JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/295774 SP - 295774 AU - Roberto A. Gulli AU - Lyndon Duong AU - Ben Corrigan AU - Guillaume Doucet AU - Sylvain Williams AU - Stefano Fusi AU - Julio C. Martinez-Trujillo Y1 - 2018/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/04/06/295774.abstract N2 - Hippocampal maps of space change across tasks. The mechanisms of this effect remain unclear. To examine this, we recorded activity of hippocampal neurons in monkeys navigating the same virtual maze during two different tasks: a foraging task requiring only cue guided navigation, and a memory task also requiring context-object association. Within each task, individual neurons had spatially-selective response fields, enabling a linear classifier to decode position in the virtual environment in each task. However, the population code did not generalize across tasks. This was due to sensory and mnemonic coding of non-spatial features and their associations by single neurons during each period of the associative memory task. Thus, sensory and mnemonic representations of non-spatial features shape maps of space in the primate hippocampus during virtual navigation. This may reflect a fundamental role of the hippocampus in compressing information from a variety of sources for efficient memory storage. ER -