Dynamic and reversible remapping of network representations in an unchanging environment

Abstract

Neurons in the medial entorhinal cortex alter their firing properties in response to environmental changes. This flexibility in neural coding is hypothesized to support navigation and memory by dividing sensory experience into unique episodes. However, it is unknown how the entorhinal circuit as a whole transitions between different representations when sensory information is not delineated into discrete contexts. Here we describe rapid and reversible transitions between multiple spatial maps of an unchanging task and environment. These remapping events were synchronized across hundreds of neurons, differentially affected navigational cell types, and correlated with changes in running speed. Despite widespread changes in spatial coding, remapping comprised a translation along a single dimension in population-level activity space, enabling simple decoding strategies. These findings provoke reconsideration of how the medial entorhinal cortex dynamically represents space and suggest a remarkable capacity of cortical circuits to rapidly and substantially reorganize their neural representations.