Abstract: Place cells are the neural substrate of spatial cognitive maps, which dynamically update as an animal discovers relevant information about its environment. A longstanding question in neuroscience is how place cells can efficiently integrate spatial (e.g. position and heading) and temporal (e.g. salient events) information to support flexible navigation. Progress has been slowed by several fundamental limitations — place cells combine multimodal inputs across the brain and reorganize over timescales ranging from seconds to months. A core technological challenge in neuroscience remains the inability to access most of the brain, most of the time, across most of an animal’s lifespan. To address this, my lab has developed a tracking microscope that enables brain-wide recording of neural activity at cellular-resolution in freely moving larval and juvenile zebrafish. With this technology, we discovered place cells for the first time in a non-amniote species and created new spatial learning assays to investigate experience-dependent changes in spatial maps. In this talk, I will discuss our recent work on the dynamics of place cell activity in changing environments, the neuromodulatory control of place cell plasticity, and our broader goal of building a holistic and mechanistic account of spatial cognition across the lifespan of an animal.