Marmoset core visual object recognition behavior is comparable to that of macaques and humans

Abstract

Summary: Among the smallest simian primates, the common marmoset offers promise as an experimentally tractable primate model for neuroscience with translational potential to humans. However, given its exceedingly small brain and body, the gap in perceptual and cognitive abilities between marmosets and humans requires study. Here, we performed a comparison of marmoset behavior to that of three other species in the domain of high-level vision. We first found that marmosets outperformed rats – a marmoset-sized rodent – on a simple recognition task, with marmosets robustly recognizing objects across views. On a more challenging invariant object recognition task used previously in humans, marmosets also achieved high performance. Notably, across hundreds of images, marmosets’ image-by-image behavior was highly similar to that of humans – nearly as human-like as macaque behavior. Thus, core aspects of visual perception are conserved across monkeys and humans, and marmosets present salient behavioral advantages over other small model organisms for visual neuroscience.

Keywords

• Biological sciences
• Neuroscience
• Sensory neuroscience