On Thursday (27.11) we will host dr hab. Jan Kamiński (Laboratory of Neurophysiology of Mind, Nencki Institute). His lecture will be entitled: "Unattended but Not Forgotten: Persistent Activity in Working Memory Representations within the Human Medial Temporal Lobe". The lecture will take place at 3 p.m. in the CN lecture hall and it will be followed by a get together.

Abstract:

Persistent neural activity is widely considered a key mechanism for storing information in working memory, especially when all items are equally task-relevant. Much less is known, however, about how the brain maintains items that are currently unattended—items often assumed to rely on “activity-silent” states.
In this study, we recorded the activity of image-selective neurons in the human medial temporal lobe while participants stored two items and shifted attention between them.

Our findings show that both attended and unattended items are supported by persistent neural activity. After an attention-shift cue, neuronal responses reorganized within a different subspace of population activity, indicating a dynamic transformation in the neural code rather than a disappearance of activity. Notably, although the identity of the unattended item could be decoded on a single-trial basis from preselected image-selective neurons, it was not decodable from the full medial temporal lobe population.

These results support models in which working memory—including unattended content—is maintained by persistent activity, and they challenge the idea that unattended items rely on purely “activity-silent” mechanisms.

Bio

Dr. Jan Kamiński graduated in Psychology from the SWPS University in Warsaw in 2007 and received his PhD in Neuroscience from the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in 2012 (summa cum laude). During his doctoral studies, he investigated the neuronal mechanisms of information integration in the rat barrel cortex.

In 2013, he moved to Los Angeles for postdoctoral training at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the California Institute of Technology, where he worked on research involving single-neuron recordings in humans. In 2017, he published the first study demonstrating persistent neural activity supporting information maintenance during human working memory (Kamiński et al., 2017). In 2018, using recordings obtained during deep brain stimulation electrode implantation, he identified memory-selective neurons in the dopaminergic substantia nigra (Kamiński et al., 2018), showing that putative human dopaminergic neurons contribute to the formation of new memories.

Since 2021, Dr. Kamiński has been a group leader at the Center of Excellence for Neural Plasticity and Brain Disorders (BRAINCITY) at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in Warsaw. His research focuses on leveraging single-neuron recordings in humans to advance our understanding of cognitive functions that are unique to the human brain.

In 2025, his team published the first study utilizing single-neuron recordings performed in Poland (Paluch et al., 2025).