Barcoding of episodic memories in the hippocampus of a food-caching bird

The hippocampus is critical for episodic memory. Although hippocampal activity represents place and other behaviorally relevant variables, it is unclear how it encodes numerous memories of specific events in life. To study episodic coding, we leveraged the specialized behavior of chickadees – food-caching birds that form memories at well-defined moments in time whenever they cache food for subsequent retrieval. Our recordings during caching revealed very sparse, transient barcode-like patterns of firing across hippocampal neurons. Each “barcode” uniquely represented a caching event and transiently reactivated during the retrieval of that specific cache. Barcodes co-occurred with the conventional activity of place cells, but were uncorrelated even for nearby cache locations that had similar place codes. We propose that animals recall episodic memories by reactivating hippocampal barcodes. Similarly to computer hash codes, these patterns assign unique identifiers to different events and c..., Raw electrophysiological, calcium imaging, and behavioral video recordings during food caching behavior in chickadee hippocampus were collected and pre-processed as described in the associated manuscript. , , # Barcoding of episodic memories in the hippocampus of a food-caching bird

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7h44j101z](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7h44j101z)

This repository contains all data used in the accompanying paper. This includes behavioral tracking and annotation of food caching behavior, electrophysiology, and calcium imaging data. Further details on the experiments, data and methods are available in the paper, published in Cell (April 11, 2024) and available as a free pre-print at: [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.27.542597v2](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.27.542597v2)

## Description of the data and file structure

Electrophysiology experiments in the grid arena are in `Grid Caching Data` with documentation in a README.m file (provided outside of the zipped archive), and imaging experiments in the circular arena are in `Circular Arena Data` with documentation in a Word doc ('Calcium imaging documentation' - also outside the zipped archive)...