1970) "What the frog's eye tells the monkey's brain." Brain, Behaviour, Evolution, 3, 324-337, 1970 (original) (raw)

What the Frog's Eye Tells the Monkey's Brain

Brain, Behavior and Evolution, 1970

Monkeys with the striate cortex destroyed have been supposed to be all but blind, their vision being limited to a rudirnentary ability to respond to the total unstructured activity of the retina. During the last 2 years I have worked extensively with two such de-striate monkeys and have found this supposition to be false. It has been possible to train these rnonkeys to reach out and touch visually presented objects, and through this I have obtained evidence of acute vision which may be comparable in sensitivity and spatial resolution to that of a normal animal. Their vision does, however, have singular features that indicate that it is quite abnormal in its qualitative character.

Vision in a monkey without striate cortex: a case study

Perception, 1974

A rhesus monkey, Helen, from whom the striate cortex was almost totally removed, was studied intensively over a period of 8 years. During this time she regained an effective, though limited, degree of visually guided behaviour. The evidence suggests that while Helen suffered a permanent loss of 'focal vision' she retained (initially unexpressed) the capacity for 'ambient vision'.

How monkeys acquire a new way of seeing

Perception, 1976

In an experiment on perceptual learning, monkeys were given the opportunity to watch on television the ‘private behaviour’ of another monkey (which did not know it was being watched). The subjects were shown monkey X for twenty sessions in a row, followed by monkey Y for twenty sessions, followed by monkey X again for twenty sessions. The subjects' ‘interest’ in the stimulus monkey remained roughly level within each block of twenty sessions, but increased in a step-like way at the changeover from X to Y, and again from Y to X. These results are interpreted as evidence that the subjects gained little or no extra insight into the nature of private behaviour through watching the same monkey in successive sessions; the critical factor in their perceptual education was the comparison between one monkey's behaviour and another's.

Visual orienting and alerting in rhesus monkeys: comparison with humans

Behavioural Brain Research, 1996

The behavioral capacities of the rhesus monkey for several sensory and cognitive tasks appear quite similar to those of humans. To evaluate the monkey's attentional capacities, we have compared monkey and human performance on a visuospatial attentional task, the cued target detection (CTD) paradigm. Animals were trained to fixate a small spot of light while a cue and a subsequent target, are flashed in the visual periphery. In valid trials, the cue and target appeared in the same spatial location; in invalid trials, the cue and target appeared in the opposite location; in double trials, two cues were presented and the target appeared in one of their locations; in no-cue trials, the cue was omitted and the target appeared in one location. In addition, we varied cognitive control over the task initiation by making the trial onset either self-paced or computer-paced. Reaction times (RTs) to target presentation, response accuracy, and frequency of aborted trials were measured for all subjects. No significant species differences were found for the patterns of RTs for different trial types or for attentional dynamics, as indexed by the decreases in RT with increasing cue-target interval. However, humans and non-human primates reacted differently to changes in cognitive control. Humans shows significant increases in no-cue trial RTs in the auto-paced task compared to the self-paced, but no differences in overall RT between tasks; monkeys showed a significant faster overall RT for the self-paced than the computer-paced task, but no difference between no-cue RTs. The performance differences between species may be related to the training history of the animals or to known anatomical differences in cortical organization, especially in the parietal lobe.

Editorial: current research on the organization and function of the visual system in primates

2014

We are delighted to announce the launch of a new thematic series on the organization and function of the visual system in nonhuman primates in Eye and Brain, expertly guest-edited by Dr Jon Kaas from the Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University. This special collection of articles presents a number of recent advances in our understanding of visual processing in primates, and highlights the need for further studies on nonhuman primates. Such studies, although rare, offer a more precise description of visual perception in the human brain and ultimately, will lead to a better understanding of visual processing and improved therapeutics for visual disorders in humans. You can access this Editorial, and all other articles published in the series, for free here: http://www.dovepress.com/eye-and-brain-archive79-v787

A naturalistic environment to study visual cognition in unrestrained monkeys

eLife

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 trial-and-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 movin...