Inoue Takao, Hasegawa Takeshi, Takara Sayuki, Lukáts Balázs, Mizuno Masaharu, Aou Shuji
Department of Brain Sciences and Engineering, Graduate School of Life Science and Systems Engineering, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Hibikino 2-4, Wakamatsu, Kitakyushu, Fukuoka, Japan.
Neurosci Res. 2008 May;61(1):70-8. doi: 10.1016/j.neures.2008.01.013. Epub 2008 Feb 6.
Macaque monkeys have a highly evolved visual system comparable to that of humans. One of the important visual functions is performing discriminations among biologically significant objects such as food or heterosexual partners. In the present study, we examined whether rhesus monkeys could categorize two-dimensional images related to food or gender using a visual discrimination task. Three rhesus monkeys were trained to make distinctions of food from non-food items, and between male and female monkeys, using 60 or more different pictures of each category. After more than 9 months of training, the monkeys discriminated a variety of foods from non-food and different males from females with more than 80% accuracy, even when the stimuli were used for the first time or presented only once in a session. The proportion of correct responses and response latencies showed better performance in discrimination of food/non-food than that of gender. The results suggest that rhesus monkeys are able to perform visual discrimination of highly abstract biologically significant categories with better performance in a food-related category than a gender-related one, using two-dimensional visual information.
猕猴拥有与人类相当的高度进化的视觉系统。重要的视觉功能之一是对食物或异性伴侣等具有生物学意义的物体进行区分。在本研究中，我们使用视觉辨别任务来检验恒河猴是否能够对与食物或性别相关的二维图像进行分类。三只恒河猴接受训练，使用每个类别60张或更多不同的图片，区分食物与非食物物品，以及雄性和雌性猴子。经过9个多月的训练，即使刺激物是首次使用或在一个实验环节中仅呈现一次，猴子们区分各种食物与非食物、区分不同雄性与雌性的准确率也超过了80%。正确反应的比例和反应潜伏期表明，在辨别食物/非食物方面的表现优于辨别性别。结果表明，恒河猴能够利用二维视觉信息，对高度抽象的具有生物学意义的类别进行视觉辨别，在与食物相关的类别中比在与性别相关的类别中表现更好。
