Stable frontal signals, flexible hippocampal ones: How the brain preserves context as goals change
· Medical Xpressby Ingrid Fadelli, Medical Xpress
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While humans are completing a task, they can temporarily store information in their minds while also manipulating and adapting it based on changing circumstances. To support this capability, known as working memory, the brain needs to hold onto important context about a task, updating it when rules, goals or circumstances change.
Researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the University of Toronto and other institutions recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding how neurons preserve context over time as the goals of an ongoing task change. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, suggest that the brain can represent the same information through different patterns of neuronal activity that vary in stability and flexibility.
"We were inspired by the remarkable ability of an individual to relentlessly pursue a goal over long periods of time, while still remaining flexible and encoding information about a changing environment," Hristos S. Courellis, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress.
"No other animal can encounter an arbitrary set of rules or behavioral constraints, immediately internalize them, and adhere to them without continuous reminders or a massive amount of conditioning or reinforcement. We wanted to study how different structures in the brain perform computations in support of these uniquely human behaviors."
Exploring how the human brain represents context
Classical neuroscience experiments probing working memory mechanisms induced animals to keep a specific stimulus in mind for a few seconds at most. Courellis and his colleagues instead analyzed neuronal recordings collected from humans as they encoded information and remembered the rules of a task for a few minutes at a time.
The recordings were collected from 25 patients with treatment-resistant epilepsy who had electrodes surgically implanted in their brains so physicians could try to identify the source of their seizures. Depending on each patient's clinical needs, the electrodes used to collect the analyzed recordings were implanted in regions including the medial frontal cortex (the section of the frontal cortex close to the brain's midline) and the hippocampus (a brain region that plays a key role in memory and learning).
The recordings were collected while participants completed two experiments that required them to keep context or rules in mind for several minutes. The researchers then used signal processing tools and artificial intelligence (AI) models to analyze the neural activity recorded by the electrodes in their brains, with the goal of better understanding how neurons represented context during the experiments.
"We designed a simple computer game involving different kinds of rules that required pressing buttons in response to different images," explained Courellis.
"These rules were sometimes explicitly given through written or verbal instructions and sometimes needed to be inferred by the patients from feedback. We recorded activity from single neurons using the implanted electrodes while patients played these games and analyzed that data using several advanced signal processing and machine learning-based techniques to make our discoveries."
Toward a deeper understanding of working memory processes
This study offers valuable new insights into how the human brain represents context as people complete tasks. Specifically, it suggests that neurons in the medial frontal cortex can maintain a stable pattern of activity to represent a rule for several minutes, even when reminders of this rule are no longer present.
"This mechanism could explain how we are able to continually remember what behavior to engage in long after the associated instructions or cues for that behavior are gone," said Courellis.
"We also demonstrated that the hippocampus forms a uniquely flexible rule representation whose format changes over time depending on what kind of behavior the person needs to exhibit. These findings are notable because they draw attention to the utility of rule representations that are stable across time and across incoming stimuli, which is thought to enable the human ability to rapidly generalize behavior to new contexts."
In the future, the results of this study may help improve neuroscientific working memory models and psychological theories describing how humans mentally tackle everyday tasks. In addition, they could inform the development and advancement of brain-inspired computational tools, including large language models (LLMs) and other machine learning models.
"Machine learning models, including modern large language models, famously struggle with generalization," explained Courellis. "One potential solution could be to implement the same kind of durable representations that exist in our own brains in these models.
"As part of our next studies, we will continue to ask questions about the neural mechanisms underlying the human ability to rapidly and flexibly learn, generalize behavior to novel situations and propose novel solutions to problems, and how our ability to encode and generate language can facilitate these behaviors."
Written for you by our author Ingrid Fadelli, edited by Sadie Harley, and fact-checked and reviewed by Robert Egan—this article is the result of careful human work. We rely on readers like you to keep independent science journalism alive. If this reporting matters to you, please consider a donation (especially monthly). You'll get an ad-free account as a thank-you.
Publication details
Hristos S. Courellis et al, Neural dynamics underlying minute-timescale persistent behaviour in the human brain, Nature Human Behaviour (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02537-x.
Journal information: Nature Human Behaviour
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Ingrid Fadelli
Freelance journalist with BSc Psychology and MA International Journalism. Covers AI, robotics, neuroscience, and astrophysics since 2018. Full profile →
Sadie Harley
BSc Life Sciences & Ecology. Microbiology lab background with pharmaceutical news experience in oil, gas, and renewable industries. Full profile →
Robert Egan
Bachelor's in mathematical biology, Master's in creative writing. Well-traveled with unique perspectives on science and language. Full profile →
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