A naturalistic environment to study visual cognition in unrestrained monkeys

Jacob, G and Katti, H and Cherian, T and Das, J and Zhivago, KA and Arun, SP (2021) A naturalistic environment to study visual cognition in unrestrained monkeys. In: eLife, 10 .

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Abstract

Macaque monkeys are widely used to study vision. In the traditional approach, monkeys are brought into a lab to perform visual tasks while they are restrained to obtain stable eye tracking and neural recordings. Here, we describe a novel environment to study visual cognition in a more natural setting as well as other natural and social behaviors. We designed a naturalistic environment with an integrated touchscreen workstation that enables high-quality eye tracking in unrestrained monkeys. We used this environment to train monkeys on a challenging same-different task. We also show that this environment can reveal interesting novel social behaviors. As proof of concept, we show that two naïve monkeys were able to learn this complex task through a combination of socially observing trained monkeys and through solo trialand-error. We propose that such naturalistic environments can be used to rigorously study visual cognition as well as other natural and social behaviors in freely moving monkeys. © 2021, eLife Sciences Publications Ltd. All rights reserved.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	eLife
Publisher:	eLife Sciences Publications Ltd
Additional Information:	The copyright for this article belongs to Authors
Keywords:	animal experiment; article; cognition; eye tracking; Haplorhini; human; nonhuman; proof of concept; social behavior
Department/Centre:	Division of Biological Sciences > Centre for Neuroscience Division of Electrical Sciences > Electrical Communication Engineering
Date Deposited:	21 Dec 2021 05:55
Last Modified:	21 Dec 2021 05:55
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/70706

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