Refinement and Retrospective Shift of the CA1 Place Code during Food-Carrying Decisions
Food carrying is an adaptive component of foraging that integrates resource evaluation with home-directed navigation, providing a naturalistic model for investigating how the brain organizes goal-directed behaviour. Despite extensive work on hippocampal coding during navigation and homing, how CA1 representations are reorganized when animals spontaneously transport acquired food home remains…
The study examines the refinement and retrospective shift of the CA1 place code during food-carrying decisions in mice engaged in a self-paced foraging task. The hippocampal coding during navigation and homing has been extensively studied, but the reorganization of CA1 representations when mice spontaneously transport acquired food home remains largely unexplored. Using one-photon calcium imaging, researchers recorded dorsal CA1 population activity during the task.
Mice displayed a preference for carrying larger pellets, indicating that the transport behavior was sensitive to resource value. During carry-home runs, spatial representations in CA1 were found to be sparser, convey more spatial information, and exhibit greater trial-to-trial stability compared to eat-inward runs. This indicates a more precise and reliable place code during home-directed transport.
Additionally, the place fields exhibited a forward shift during carrying, consistent with a retrospective bias towards recently traversed locations. These findings suggest that the self-generated food-handling decision led to coordinated changes in the precision, stability, and temporal organization of CA1 activity. By bridging a self-generated food-handling decision with coordinated changes in CA1 activity, the study extends hippocampal spatial-coding frameworks from trained navigation to ecologically grounded foraging behavior.
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