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

Episodic memory, or memory of experienced events, is a critical function of the hippocampus(1–3). It is therefore important to understand how hippocampal activity represents specific events in an animal’s life. We addressed this question in chickadees – specialist food-caching birds that hide food at scattered locations and use memory to find their caches later in time(4,5). We performed high-density neural recordings in the hippocampus of chickadees as they cached and retrieved seeds in a laboratory arena. We found that each caching event was represented by a burst of firing in a unique set of hippocampal neurons. These ‘barcode-like’ patterns of activity were sparse (<10% of neurons active), uncorrelated even for immediately adjacent caches, and different even for separate caches at the same location. The barcode representing a specific caching event was transiently reactivated whenever a bird later interacted with the same cache – for example, to retrieve food. Barcodes co-occurred with conventional place cell activity(6,7), as well as location-independent responses to cached seeds. We propose that barcodes are signatures of episodic memories evoked during memory recall. These patterns assign a unique identifier to each event and may be a mechanism for rapid formation and storage of many non-interfering memories.