Discrimination of functionally referential calls by laboratory-housed rhesus macaques: implications for neuroethological studies.
Prior to examining the neural correlates of auditory cognition with ethologically relevant stimuli, it is first necessary to establish that laboratory-housed animals respond to these stimuli with species-typical responses. Here, we report the results of experiments on laboratory-housed rhesus monkeys using both species-typical vocalizations and band-pass noise. Paralleling the approach used in field studies of this species, we used a habituation-discrimination paradigm in which auditory stimuli were presented and a monkey's orienting responses to the stimuli were quantified. In parallel with the results obtained in field studies, we found that laboratory-housed rhesus classified species-typical vocalizations according to their putative referent properties as opposed to similarities in their acoustic morphology. In control experiments, monkeys oriented to band-pass noise but did not categorize differences in the spectral composition of the noise stimuli. These findings support the hypothesis that laboratory-housed rhesus classify, in the absence of training, species-typical vocalizations in a manner comparable to rhesus monkeys living under more natural conditions. As such, species-typical vocalizations are an appropriate and necessary class of stimuli in experiments that explore the neural correlates of auditory cognition in rhesus monkeys from a neuroethological perspective.
Gifford
Gordon W
GW
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA. Gordon.Gifford@dartmouth.edu
Hauser
Marc D
MD
Cohen
Yale E
YE
D000818:Animals; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic / Q000502:physiology; D008253:Macaca mulatta; D008297:Male; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013997:Time Factors; D014828:Vocalization, Animal / Q000502:physiology*