Experience shapes the transformation of olfactory representations along the cortico-hippocampal pathway.

Overview

1. Neuroelectronics Research Flanders (NERF), Leuven, Belgium
2. Department of Neurosciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
3. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkiye
4. Department of Computer Science, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
5. Department of Electrical Engineering, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

Perception relies on the neural representation of sensory stimuli. Primary sensory cortical representations have been extensively studied, but how sensory information propagates to memory-related multisensory areas has not been well described. We studied this question in the olfactory cortico-hippocampal pathway in mice. We recorded single units in the anterior olfactory nucleus (AON), the anterior piriform cortex (aPCx), the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC), the hippocampal CA1 subfield, and the subiculum (SUB) while animals performed a non-associative learning paradigm involving novel and familiar stimuli. In the AON, neurons were broadly tuned to different chemicals, and their responses were strongly modulated by experience. From the AON to hippocampal structures, the selectivity of neurons for specific odorants increased, concurrent with the development of population-level odor representations, which became independent of novelty and familiarity. While both stimulus identity and experience were thus reflected in all regions, their neural representations progressively separated. Our findings provide a potential mechanism for how sensory representations are transformed to support stimulus identification and implicit memories.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Data

Datasets cited

• doi:10.17632/pbtf7bbnb8.1 — at the source; found in “Data availability”

Data availability

Behavioral and electrophysiological data have been deposited at https://doi.org/10.17632/pbtf7bbnb8.1 and are publicly available.

The following dataset was generated:

Schiltz E, Broux M, Haesler S. 2026. Head-fixed recording of mice in olfactory paradigm. Mendeley Data.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Versions

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Version 1, 27 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, pages, dates, 5 authors, 1 keyword, 10 MeSH terms, 2 funders, 53 references.

Cite

This paper

Schiltz, E., Broux, M., Aydin, C., Goncalves, P. J., & Sebastian, H. (2026). Experience shapes the transformation of olfactory representations along the cortico-hippocampal pathway. eLife, 13, RP103373. https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.103373

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