During goal-directed navigation, ‘what’ information, describing the experiences occurring in periods surrounding a reward, can be combined with spatial ‘where’ information to guide behavior and form episodic memories. This integrative process likely occurs in the hippocampus, which receives spatial information from the medial entorhinal cortex; however, the source of the ‘what’ information is largely unknown. Here, we show that mouse lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) represents key experiential epochs during reward-based navigation tasks. We discover separate populations of neurons that signal goal approach and goal departure and a third population signaling reward consumption. When reward location is moved, these populations immediately shift their respective representations of each experiential epoch relative to reward, while optogenetic inhibition of LEC disrupts learning the new reward location. Therefore, the LEC contains a stable code of experiential epochs surrounding and including reward consumption, providing reward-centric information to contextualize the spatial information carried by the medial entorhinal cortex.

在目标导向的导航过程中，描述奖励周围时期发生的经历的“什么”信息可以与空间“哪里”信息相结合，以指导行为并形成情景记忆。这种整合过程可能发生在海马体中，海马体从内侧内嗅皮层接收空间信息。然而，“什么”信息的来源很大程度上未知。在这里，我们展示了小鼠外侧内嗅皮层（LEC）代表了基于奖励的导航任务期间的关键体验时期。我们发现了不同的神经元群，它们发出目标接近和目标离开的信号，以及第三个神经元群，发出奖励消耗的信号。当奖励位置移动时，这些群体立即改变他们各自相对于奖励的每个体验时期的表示，而 LEC 的光遗传学抑制会扰乱学习新的奖励位置。因此，LEC 包含围绕并包括奖励消费的经验时代的稳定代码，提供以奖励为中心的信息，以将内侧内嗅皮层携带的空间信息情境化。