Overview

• The study published in Nature Neuroscience demonstrates for the first time that the retrosplenial cortex holds concurrent neural representations of multiple spatial hypotheses as mice navigate ambiguous cues.
• Researchers used a circular arena with 16 ports and identical light dots that only appear when mice are nearby to force reliance on short-term spatial memory rather than scent or dead reckoning.
• Neural ensemble recordings revealed distinct low-dimensional activity patterns corresponding to individual hypotheses that collapsed into a single representation when sensory information clarified the correct port.
• The work builds on computational models by Ila Fiete showing artificial recurrent neural networks develop similar dynamic attractor states, suggesting a conserved computational principle for spatial reasoning.
• Researchers now plan to examine how the prefrontal cortex and other brain regions support naturalistic navigation and decision making beyond laboratory tasks.