Transformations of the spatial activity manifold convey aversive information in CA3

We investigated how spatial and affective information combine in the population activity of CA3 axons by imaging intermediate-to-dorsal and dorsal-to-dorsal projections in mice navigating a linear track before, during, and after exposure to an aversive air puff stimulus.

Our analyses reveal that both axonal populations maintain a robust, time-invariant spatial coding manifold across recordings, independent of affective context. Alterations to this common manifold encode the presence of the aversive stimulus without disrupting the spatial representation. Both axonal pathways encoded affective information with similar efficacy.