Food carrying is an adaptive component of natural foraging that couples resource evaluation with navigation toward home. Understanding how hippocampal spatial representations change when animals decide to transport acquired food provides a model for how goal-directed behaviours are organized in the brain. Prior work has characterized hippocampal place coding during navigation and homing, but how dorsal CA1 population activity is reorganized when animals spontaneously carry food home has not been fully explored.
The study reported here examined CA1 place coding during a self-generated, ecologically relevant decision—whether to consume food where it was acquired or to transport it back to the home location for consumption. The goal was to determine whether the precision, stability, and temporal organization of the CA1 place code differ across these behavioural outcomes.
Dorsal CA1 population activity was recorded using one-photon calcium imaging with a V4 Miniscope while mice performed a self-paced foraging task. The approach allowed longitudinal observation of population activity in a naturalistic task in which animals could choose how to handle acquired food. The provided source reports the imaging modality (one-photon calcium imaging) and Miniscope model (V4 Miniscope) and specifies dorsal CA1 as the recorded region.
No additional methodological specifics, such as animal numbers, imaging frame rates, or analysis pipelines, were provided in the source content beyond these core elements of the experimental approach.
Mice performed a foraging task in which food could either be consumed at the acquisition site (an eat-inward run) or carried back to the home site for consumption (a carry-homeward run). The animals showed a behavioural sensitivity to resource value: they preferentially carried larger pellets to the home, indicating that the decision to transport food was modulated by the perceived value of the resource.
This self-paced decision paradigm links an internally generated choice about food handling to navigational behaviour and provides a framework for comparing hippocampal coding across distinct, naturally occurring outcomes.
CA1 spatial representations differed systematically depending on whether the mouse carried food home or ate at the acquisition site. During carry-homeward runs, CA1 population activity exhibited three notable characteristics relative to eat-inward runs:
Collectively, these differences point to a more precise and reliable place code during home-directed carrying than during inward eating runs.
In addition to changes in sparsity, information content, and stability, place fields exhibited a systematic forward shift during carrying behaviour. The authors interpret this forward shift as consistent with a retrospective bias toward recently traversed locations, altering the temporal organization of CA1 spatial activity during food transport.
This temporal reorganization—shifts in the spatial tuning of place fields—is reported as coordinated with the decision to carry food, suggesting that CA1 does not only change the fidelity of spatial information but also its temporal alignment relative to the animal’s trajectory.
By comparing self-generated food-handling outcomes within the same foraging paradigm, the study links a spontaneous behavioural choice to coordinated changes in multiple dimensions of CA1 coding: precision (information content), reliability (trial-to-trial stability), sparsity (pattern distribution), and temporal organization (place-field shifts).
These observations extend hippocampal spatial-coding frameworks beyond trained or imposed navigation tasks, demonstrating that naturalistic, ecologically grounded decisions during foraging are associated with distinct hippocampal population dynamics. The results support the view that the hippocampus flexibly reorganizes spatial codes to meet the demands of different goal-directed behaviours.
The work reports that dorsal CA1 place coding is refined when mice elect to carry food home: representations become sparser, more informative, and more stable, and place fields shift forward consistent with a retrospective bias. These coordinated changes suggest that hippocampal spatial representations are sensitive to self-generated foraging decisions and to resource value.
Because the article is a preprint, the findings have not been certified by peer review. The source does not provide detailed quantitative data, statistical outcomes, or full methodological parameters in the abstract excerpt provided here; those details would need to be consulted in the full preprint for replication or application in experimental design. The authors declared no competing interests in the provided content.