HMN 2026: How Brain cells reshape structure and function for vision and memory tasks

An international research team led jointly by the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG), the University of Göttingen and the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, has shown that nerve cells in the brain specialize in different tasks when processing visual information.

The research focused on working memory—a complex network of different brain regions that stores and links information. A disruption in this information processing can lead to neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders.

The study results could help identify new treatment approaches for these disorders and have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Humans and other primates possess a highly developed and hierarchically organized visual processing system in the brain. The conscious processing of visual information begins in the primary visual cortex. Here, features such as edges, lines, motion and color are detected and ultimately relayed to higher-level areas such as the lateral prefrontal cortex.

This brain region plays a key role in working memory, which is also essential for processing complex visual information, such as navigating urban traffic. The extent to which nerve cells in these two brain regions are involved in performing these various tasks has not yet been fully elucidated.

An international team of researchers led jointly by the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG), the University of Göttingen and the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, studied nerve cells from the primary visual cortex and the lateral prefrontal cortex in marmosets, measuring the cells’ three-dimensional structure and electrical function.

Three of the nerve cell types studied showed differences in structure and function depending on whether they originated from primary or higher brain regions that process visual information. The study was conducted as part of the subproject “In vitro physiology, morphology, and circuitry of working memory” within the international NeuroNex research project.

“For the first time, these findings provide us with comprehensive insights into the differences between nerve cells in various brain regions and their functional significance,” says Prof. Dr. Jochen Staiger, director of the Department of Neuroanatomy at the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG) and senior author of the study.

“We see that nerve cells appear to adapt structurally and functionally depending on the task at hand and their location in the brain, and to a much greater extent in primates than in rodents. This is an important finding that serves as a starting point for a better understanding of working memory, which appears to play a role in the development of neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.”

Andreas Neef, head of the Laboratory of Neurophysics at the Göttingen Campus Institute for Dynamics of Biological Networks (CIDBN) and also senior author of the study, adds, “Our electrical and structural investigations bridge the gap between other research branches of the NeuroNex project, which focus on molecular biology and computational neuroscience. Together, we are gaining a comprehensive picture of working memory, a specialization found in such a pronounced form in very few animal groups other than humans and other primates.”

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