Multiscale representation of very large environments in the hippocampus of flying bats

Abstract

Coding for space in the mammalian brain Nearly all mammals navigate over large spatial scales in environments that span hundreds of meters to many kilometers. However, very little is known about the neural representations that underlie the coding of such large spaces. Eliav et al. recorded from place cells in the hippocampus of bats as they flew back and forth on an extremely long track (see the Perspective by Wood and Dudchenko). Many place cells had multiple place fields within this large environment. The place field sizes ranged from less than 1 meter up to 32 meters, and the sizes of the different place fields of an individual cell varied as much as 20-fold. Studying animals under naturalistic conditions can reveal new coding principles for the representation of their environment in the brain. Science , abg4020, this issue p. eabg4020 ; see also abi9663, p. 913