@marisosa @giocomo congrats and thank you for this great work!!
I (personally - but curious if you also see it that way) interpret it as showing that reward delivery is used as a localization cue (at least in VR) by the hippocampus. Previous studies hinted at this but yours clearly demonstrates it, including the distance to cue coding that we often see with place cells and walls!
And it makes sense from a general coding point of view: it is likely that the hippocampus doesn’t discriminate the type of cues that are used for localization - if inputs are consistently occurring together, it will associate them together, regardless of their original nature…