PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Georgin Jacob
AU  - Harish Katti
AU  - Thomas Cherian
AU  - Jhilik Das
AU  - Zhivago KA
AU  - SP Arun
TI  - A naturalistic environment to study natural social behaviors and cognitive tasks in freely moving monkeys
AID  - 10.1101/2020.09.25.311555
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.09.25.311555
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/15/2020.09.25.311555.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/15/2020.09.25.311555.full
AB  - Macaque monkeys are widely used to study the neural basis of cognition. In the traditional approach, the monkey is brought into a lab to perform tasks while it is restrained to obtain stable gaze tracking and neural recordings. This unnatural setting prevents studying brain activity during natural, social and complex behaviors. Here, we designed a naturalistic environment with an integrated behavioral workstation that enables complex task training with viable gaze tracking in freely moving monkeys. We used this facility to train monkeys on a challenging same-different task. Remarkably, this facility enabled a naïve monkey to learn the task merely by observing trained monkeys. This social training was faster primarily because the naïve monkey first learned the task structure and then the same-different rule. We propose that such hybrid environments can be used to study brain activity during natural behaviors as well as during controlled cognitive tasks.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.