Hippocampal place cell firing is thought to encode the location of an animal in its environment. However, in rats continually passing the same location to reach different places, the firing of place cells linked to that location seems to be influenced by their start or end position, suggesting that place cell firing is also linked to behavioural goals. Grieves et al. showed that when rats could take two different overlapping routes to reach the same end position, most place cells that fired on both routes showed route-dependent firing patterns, suggesting that place fields represent the trajectory rather than the behavioural goal.