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. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. The social complexity hypothesis 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. Historically, one of the issues retarding the development of such studies in monkeys is the difficulty in presenting animals with experimentally-controlled social stimuli. This project is designed to develop a new behavioral paradigm for studying primate social cognition that permits reliable experimental control of social stimuli by using digitally-edited video clips of monkeys interacting. We successfully trained monkeys to perform dominance discriminations using videos.. Monkeys learn the discriminations rapidly. Probe tests appear to show that monkeys remember the identity and relative rank of monkeys shown in the training videos, as evidenced by their ability to pick the dominant when two familiar monkeys are show in neutral behavior. Other types of behavioral probes have shown that dominance information is not the only determinant of choice behavior, however, and other probes are currently being run to determine the other determinants of performance. These results position us to refine the training techniques and better characterize the cognitive underpinnings of choice behavior in this task before moving to the more complex goals of the project.