Hippocampal place cell sequences depict future paths to remembered goals

Effective navigation requires planning extended routes to remembered goal locations. Hippocampal place cells have been proposed to play a role in navigational planning but direct evidence has been lacking. Here, we show that prior to goal-directed navigation in an open arena, the hippocampus generates brief sequences encoding spatial trajectories strongly biased to progress from the subject’s current location to a known goal location. These sequences predict immediate future behavior, even in cases when the specific combination of start and goal locations is novel. These results suggest that hippocampal sequence events previously characterized in linearly constrained environments as ‘replay’ are also capable of supporting a goal-directed, trajectory-finding mechanism, which identifies important places and relevant behavioral paths, at specific times when memory retrieval is required, and in a manner which could be used to control subsequent navigational behavior.