Résumé
Monkeys are widely used as model organisms for vision and cognition. While their anatomy and physiology have strong correspondences with humans, it is unclear whether they truly see the way we do. In most studies, monkeys are extensively trained on specific tasks, leaving us without a more general answer to this question, along with the nagging doubt that the extensive training might have altered their perception. So how do we then test whether monkeys see the way we do?
To address this problem, we have trained monkeys on a highly general oddball visual search task, so that their performance on each image set can elucidate various perceptual phenomena, and compared their performance with humans doing the same tasks. I will describe a number of interesting qualitative similarities and differences between monkeys and humans revealed by this approach.
In the second part of my talk, I will describe our efforts to solve a related but equally fundamental problem with understanding vision and its neural basis. In traditional monkey neurophysiology, brain activity is recorded in a highly controlled setting, leaving us blind to how brain activity might be organized during natural behaviours. To address this gap, we have been building a unique naturalistic environment to perform wireless recordings in both controlled and naturalistic settings. I will describe our preliminary results with wireless recordings from high-level visual and motor regions while monkeys interacted with objects and people in a naturalistic environment.
