Authors: James Bigelow Amy Poremba
Publish Date: 2016/03/24
Volume: 19, Issue: 4, Pages: 799-811
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 shortterm memory in nonhuman primates is facilitated by the audiovisual presentation format Three macaque monkeys that had previously learned an auditory delayed matchingtosample 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“All applicable international national and/or institutional guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed All procedures performed in studies involving animals were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institution or practice at which the studies were conducted”
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