more prominent in complex environments. When different segments of a maze are geometrically similar, such as for the corridors of a hairpin labyrinth, hippocampal and entorhinal cortex neurons fire the same sequences in each corridor, although distinct sets of neurons fire on opposite journeys7,35,64. The chunking of the neuronal representation at each entry point can be assisted by resetting of the path integrator7 or of the self-organized cell assembly trajectories by a new initial condition65. Chunking is an efficient way to limit the accumulation of error inherent in long sequences and is a frequent strategy for encoding episodic information66. We suggest that chunking is a common property of path integration–based navigation and episodic memory systems.
