Monkeys know if something is old news

• Autores: Aylin Woodward
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3140, 2017, pág. 14
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Vasushi Miyashita at the University of Tokyo, Japan, and his colleagues investigate how monkeys know if something is old news. By training macaques to indicate whether an object was familiar. The monkeys saw some objects once a month, or once every 12,000 trials, and so categorised them as "new". Meanwhile, other objects were shown in every trial, and so categorised as old. It turns out monkeys have a cluster of neurons in their brains that decides whether or not they have seen objects before. When researchers stimulated the entire perirhinal cortex with light the monkeys categorised all objects as old, regardless of whether they really were.