title: Audiovisual integration facilitates monkeys' short-term memory.
abstract: Many human behaviors are known to benefit from audiovisual integration, including language and communication, recognizing individuals, social decision making, and memory. Exceptionally little is known about the contributions of audiovisual integration to behavior in other primates. The current experiment investigated whether short-term memory in nonhuman primates is facilitated by the audiovisual presentation format. Three macaque monkeys that had previously learned an auditory delayed matching-to-sample (DMS) task were trained to perform a similar visual task, after which they were tested with a concurrent audiovisual DMS task with equal proportions of auditory, visual, and audiovisual trials. Parallel to outcomes in human studies, accuracy was higher and response times were faster on audiovisual trials than either unisensory trial type. Unexpectedly, two subjects exhibited superior unimodal performance on auditory trials, a finding that contrasts with previous studies, but likely reflects their training history. Our results provide the first demonstration of a bimodal memory advantage in nonhuman primates, lending further validation to their use as a model for understanding audiovisual integration and memory processing in humans.
authors.affiliation: Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.|Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Sandler Neurosciences Center, 675 Nelson Rising Lane, San Francisco, CA, 94158, USA.
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bigelow
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Iowa, E11 Seashore Hall, Iowa City, IA, 52242, USA. amy-poremba@uiowa.edu.
authors.forename: Amy
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Poremba
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000818:Animals; D000882:Haplorhini; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011930:Reaction Time
keywords: Crossmodal integration; Macaque; Multisensory integration; Primate; Proactive interference; Working memory