Understanding how the heterogeneous activity patterns of individual neurons give rise to coherent population dynamics and cognition is a central challenge in neuroscience. In the hippocampus, neurons are tuned to spatial location, yet their activity is also modulated by multiple external and internal variables and appears to drift randomly over time, making it difficult to link hippocampal computations to behavior. By analyzing hippocampal population dynamics in behaving mice, we reveal a structured organization underlying the diversity of single-neuron responses—the hippocampus encodes different aspects of experience as disentangled variables represented in the co-activity dynamics of cell assemblies.
The temporal and contextual components of these representations are governed by local inhibitory interactions and input-driven cell–assembly dynamics, respectively. Our findings reveal the circuit basis of disentangled hippocampal representations, offering a unifying geometric principle of population coding that supports flexible memory representations and enables rapid generalization of prior knowledge to new situations. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription Receive 12 print issues and online access Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout All data necessary to evaluate the results of the study are available in the main text or the supplementary materials.
Additional raw data are available from the corresponding authors upon request. Source data are provided with this paper. Custom scripts used in this study can be downloaded from GitHub (https://github.com/ayalab1/neurocode and https://github.com/ayalab1/drift_project).
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