COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY — A study by Assistant Professor Nuttida Rungratsameetaweemana and her team from Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science was published in PLOS Biology on July 2, 2026. The research details the role of inhibitory neurons in enabling the brain's early visual areas to adapt to changing tasks.

In 2025, the team published fMRI scans showing unexpected activity levels in the earliest visual areas of the cortex. These scans indicated that early visual areas processed information differently depending on the task the research participant was performing. To investigate the underlying mechanisms further, the team constructed a neural network model.

The neural network model incorporated both excitatory neurons, which drive firing, and inhibitory neurons, which suppress firing. It included a sensory module for input and a higher-level module downstream. The model's functionality relied on inhibitory neurons suppressing other inhibitory neurons to facilitate information flow from the higher-level module to the sensory module.

"To get at the mechanism, we needed something we could take apart and change, so we turned to neural models," Rungratsameetaweemana said. When the inhibitory-on-inhibitory connections in this model were weakened, its ability to switch between tasks collapsed, whereas weakening other types of connections left its performance largely unaffected. Tests conducted with mice further supported these findings, showing that silencing inhibitory cells in the visual cortex reduced the brain's ability to track task context.

Rungratsameetaweemana began working with patients missing the hippocampus in 2015. The research was supported by the ARL Human Guided Intelligent Systems grant (W911NF-23-2-0067) and the Strengthening Teamwork for Robust Operations in Novel Groups (STRONG) grant (W911NF-22-2-0148). Tomas Gallo Aquino and Robert Kim are listed as co-first authors of the paper. The team is also currently recording neural activity from epilepsy patients using electrodes placed deep within the brain.