Coordinated prefrontal–hippocampal activity and navigation strategy-related prefrontal firing during spatial memory formation

Significance Learning the location of relevant places is an iterative process in which animals gradually adjust and optimize their navigation patterns to reach the target. This cognitive operation requires the interplay between the hippocampus, which represents the animal’s current location, and the prefrontal cortex, which implements the selection of adaptive behavioral responses. Yet, how do these structures interact during spatial learning? By recording neural activity in freely behaving mice, we found that the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus gradually increase their oscillatory synchrony as learning progresses, whereas the firing patterns of prefrontal neurons represent the behavioral goal exclusively when the optimal trajectory is selected. These findings provide insight into the cortical dynamics underlying spatial learning.