Overview
- A peer-reviewed paper published June 4, 2026 reports that repeated training shifted a visual categorization task from the prefrontal cortex to the temporal cortex, making the task more automatic.
- Eleven adults completed more than 30,000 app-based image-sorting trials over 5–10 weeks while researchers measured brain activity with fMRI and EEG before and after training.
- Neuroimaging showed category information in a car-selective temporal area bypassed the prefrontal ‘bottleneck’ and linked directly to output regions, and greater offloading correlated with better performance on a second task done at the same time.
- The study has clear limits: the sample was small, participants varied in how quickly their brains offloaded the task, and sensory or attention constraints (for example, taking your eyes off the road) will still make some real-world multitasking unsafe.
- Authors and commentators say the finding could reshape how we teach skills, help explain automatic or compulsive behaviors, and guide AI approaches to continual learning, and the team plans follow-up work to map the signals and task types that allow safe parallel processing.