MIT neuroscientists reported on August 17, 2026, that mouse experiments identified neurons in the prefrontal cortex that appeared to store either a sensory input or an action plan in working memory, the first evidence they reported for flexible modules. The paper was published in Nature Neuroscience, with Mriganka Sur of MIT's Picower Institute and Timothy Buschman of Princeton as senior authors.

Mice were trained to judge whether two high or low pitched tones were the same and respond accordingly while electrical activity was recorded from the prefrontal and parietal cortex. Computational analysis of thousands of neurons found parietal neurons that stored only the tone memory. In the prefrontal cortex, a cluster stored the first tone during one interval, then the action plan during the next.

The authors framed the result as support for reusable circuits, not a new treatment. They said they now planned to test whether inhibiting these modules during different parts of the task affected the animals' behavior.