Population dynamics underlying associative learning in the dorsal and ventral hippocampus

Abstract

Animals associate cues with outcomes and continually update these associations as new information is presented. The hippocampus is crucial for this, yet how neurons track changes in cue-outcome associations remains unclear. Using 2-photon calcium imaging, we tracked the same dCA1 and vCA1 neurons across days to determine how responses evolve across phases of odor-outcome learning. We find that, initially, odors elicited robust responses in dCA1, whereas in vCA1 responses emerged after learning, including broad representations that stretched across cue, trace, and outcome periods. Population dynamics in both regions rapidly reorganized with learning, then stabilized into ensembles that stored odor representations for days, even after extinction or pairing with a different outcome. Finally, we found stable, robust signals across CA1 when anticipating reward, but not when anticipating inescapable shock. These results identify how the hippocampus encodes, stores, and updates learned associations, and illuminates the unique contributions of dorsal and ventral hippocampus.