Persistent hippocampal traces of lifelong spatial memory

Memory presents a biological paradox: the brain changes continuously, yet a brief experience can influence behavior for a lifetime. How such memories are stored in brain circuits remains unclear. Here we show that two days in a binary-tree maze leave mice with spatial memories that survive repeated 90-day absences over as much as a year. Across return visits, mice explored the maze more efficiently than when naive and resumed direct runs to a reward location sooner, both by a factor of 3. Chronic calcium imaging of the same hippocampal CA1 neurons showed that although most neurons had changed their preferred locations, the population activity at a given maze location still resembled the pattern from 90 days earlier. Furthermore, even when a neuron's place fields changed location, they tended to remain at the same branching level of the binary tree, reflecting the local geometry of the maze. In return sessions where the neural tuning for branching level was preserved more accurately, the mouse explored the environment more efficiently. Population patterns were best preserved near the reward location, and more reliable neural activity there accompanied earlier direct runs to the reward. With repeated experience, spatial representations changed less, both within a visit and across the long absences. A brief experience thus left selective hippocampal traces that survived months of absence despite drift, grew more durable with each return, and were correlated with memory in navigation behavior.