Low-cost, portable, easy-to-use kiosks to facilitate home-cage testing of non-human primates during vision-based behavioral tasks

Abstract

Non-human primates, especially rhesus macaques, have played a significant role in our current understanding of the neural computations underlying human vision. Apart from the established homologies in the visual brain areas between these two species, and our extended abilities to probe detailed neural mechanisms in monkeys at multiple scales, one major factor that makes NHPs an extremely appealing animal model of human-vision is their ability to perform human-like visual behavior. Traditionally such behavioral studies have been conducted in the controlled laboratory settings. Such in-lab studies offer the experimenter a tight control over many experimental variables. However, typical constraints related to such experiments include, 1) limited total experimental time, 2) requirement of dedicated human experimenters for the NHPs, 3) requirement of additional lab-space, 4) additional time and training required for chairing and head restraints of monkeys, 5) NHPs often need to undergo invasive surgeries for a head-post implant. To overcome these limitations, many laboratories have now adapted home-cage behavioral training and testing of NHPs. Home-cage behavioral testing enables the administering of many vision-based behavioral tasks simultaneously across multiple monkeys with much reduced human personnel requirements, no NHP head restraint, and provide NHPs access to the experiments without specific time constraints. Here, we provide the details of operating and building a portable, easy-to-use kiosk for conducting home-cage vision-based behavioral tasks in NHPs.

Object motion representation in the macaque ventral stream – a gateway to understanding the brain’s intuitive physics engine

“…If the monkeys did not hold their gaze within a small window (±2°) before the choice screen appeared, the trial was aborted. To facilitate training and behavioral data collection, the monkeys also performed the same task in their home cages 71 , with the only difference being that they indicated their choice by touching a touchscreen instead of maintaining their gaze on the selected target for 700 ms.…”