Goal-directed action transiently depends on action space

Rats use spatiotemporal features of the environment to navigate to a goal, but whether representations of ‘action space’ are necessary for non-navigational goal-directed actions is unknown. We addressed this question by assessing goal-directed action control across contexts and under hippocampal inactivation and found that such actions do indeed rely on a representation of action space but only immediately after initial acquisition. One Sentence Summary Goal-directed actions depend on a hippocampal representation of action space immediately after initial encoding but not after a delay.