A NEUROETHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO MEMORY AND COGNITION IN MONKEYS

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. Primary support for the subproject and the subproject's principal investigator may have been provided by other sources, including other NIH sources. The Total Cost listed for the subproject likely represents the estimated amount of Center infrastructure utilized by the subproject, not direct funding provided by the NCRR grant to the subproject or subproject staff. Primate cognition may have evolved in response to selective pressures for the ability to process complex social information. This suggests that central insights into the structure and function of primate cognition will be achieved through the study of social cognition. However, few neurobehavioral studies of primate cognition have made use of social stimuli. There is a critical need for studies of social cognition in primates. One of the issues retarding the development of such studies in monkeys is the difficulty in presenting animals with experimentally-controlled social stimuli. Our objective in this project is to develop behavioral paradigms for studying primate social cognition that permit reliable experimental control of social stimuli using digitally-edited video clips. We have created a library of primate social behavior videos. We filmed individual monkeys engaged in a variety of social behaviors and have edited these clips together to make realistic artificial social interactions. Monkeys have been trained to make dominance discriminations using these video clips. Other tests have shown that the monkeys remember individuals seen in the videos. We have discovered close parallels with human face perception in monkeys. We have successfully trained monkeys on a transitive inference task thought to be similar to dominance hierarchy learning. We have shown that monkeys readily "link" ordered lists, indicating that associative strength cannot account for performance in transitive inference tasks. We have developed techniques for automatically testing monkey cognition in large social groups.