Abstract
The ability to swiftly and smoothly switch from one task set to another is central to intelligent behavior, because it allows an organism to flexibly adapt to ever changing environmental conditions and internal needs. For this reason, researchers interested in executive control processes have often relied on task-switching paradigms as powerful tools to uncover the underlying cognitive and brain architecture. In order to gather fundamental information at the single-cell level, it would be greatly helpful to demonstrate that non-human primates, especially the macaque monkey, share with us similar behavioral manifestations of task-switching and therefore, in all likelihood, similar underlying brain mechanisms. Unfortunately, prior attempts have provided negative results (e.g., Stoet & Snyder, 2003b), in that it was reported that macaques do not show the typical signature of task-switching operations at the behavioral level, represented by switch costs. If confirmed, this would indicate that the macaque cannot be used as a model approach to explore human executive control mechanisms by means of task-switching paradigms. We have therefore decided to re-explore this issue, by conducting a comparative experiment on a group of human participants and two macaque monkeys, whereby we measured and compared performance costs linked to task switching and resistance to interference across the two species. Contrary to what previously reported, we found that both species display robust task switching costs, thus supporting the claim that macaque monkeys provide an exquisitely suitable model to study the brain mechanisms responsible for maintaining and switching task sets.
Highlights
Due to the close proximity in evolutionary terms between the two species, non-human primates are typically taken as almost ideal models for studying cognitive functions of humans
Results obtained from Monkey #1 (M1), Monkey #2 (M2) and the human participants will be described separately, and they refer to behavioral data collected during 82, 40 and 8 experimental sessions, respectively
We looked for any inter-species difference in overall behavioral performance by comparing error rate (ER) and reaction times (RTs) of humans, M1 and M2 across all trials through a one-way ANalyses Of VAriance (ANOVA) (Figure 3)
Summary
Due to the close proximity in evolutionary terms between the two species, non-human primates are typically taken as almost ideal models for studying cognitive functions of humans. A few fMRI studies have even compared animal and human cognitive mechanisms directly by measuring brain activations in both species while the respective individuals were engaged in performing the same behavioral tasks (e.g., [1]). It appears that non-human primates have provided a viable and valuable animal model for exploring several aspects of non-verbal human cognition, including perception, attention, memory, decision making, emotional-motivational processing, and action planning, as well as the underlying brain mechanisms. Psychological and neurobiological conceptualizations refer to the executive control system as an overarching system that coordinates cognitive resources for flexibly adapting behavior to immediate environmental demands and moment-to-moment needs of the individual [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
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