Event:

Navigating through the world is typically a multisensory experience. Mammals are believed to navigate using a cognitive map of space stored in the hippocampus. Yet, it is unclear how and whether different sensory modalities of extrinsic spatial cues can contribute to this map. This has been difficult to study due to the overwhelming sensory complexity of the real world. To overcome this difficulty, we establish a multisensory virtual reality system to independently control visual and olfactory virtual landscapes. We demonstrate that head-fixed mice in this environment can perform odor-guided navigation in darkness, as well as multisensory-guided navigation to locate hidden rewards by integrating vision and olfaction. These behaviors engage hippocampal "place cells" that are tuned to the different sensory coordinates, suggesting multisensory sub-components of the cognitive map.