Representation of fear memory features in the ventral hippocampus

Fear memories are essential for adaptive behavior, as they encode salient and emotionally valenced information that enables organisms to anticipate and avoid future threats. Fearful events are experienced as unified representations, even though they consist of multiple features with distributed sensory inputs across space and time that are integrated and imbued with emotional valence. Whether these features are jointly or separately represented by the memory networks in the brain and how such memories guide behavior during novel experiences remains unclear. Here, we use a virtual reality paradigm to disentangle spatial, temporal, and emotional memory features in the mouse ventral CA1 hippocampus. We show that distinct spatial and temporal representations emerge for context- and cue-related features, with temporal features transferring to novel experiences. The preservation of neural geometry, but not of individual neural identities, is prominent in pyramidal neurons and may, alongside dynamic modulation of interneuron activity, reflect a general principle by which selective memory features are maintained and adaptively exploited.