Mcb777 APP Why this Indian institute took its lab to the monkeys

The use of Macaque monkeys in cognitive studies is fairly common, but a team of scientists from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru has found a novel way of training and studying them. Pointing out that Macaque monkeys are widely used in cognitive studies because they are highly intelligent social creatures with many similarities to humans, the scientists said such monkeys are usually brought into specialised labs and constrained to obtain brain recordings and track eye movements while they perform complex cognitive tasks.“The existing approach prevents studying vision in more natural settings and also natural and social behaviours. Therefore, we decided to turn this on its head by bringing a specialised lab into the monkey’s home,” said SP Arun, associate professor, Centre for Neuroscience.Watch: Monkeys at the new lab medium nocaption89728737In their new lab, monkeys move freely in a large natural space — with trees and play area — and also access a touchscreen workstation where they can be trained to perform complex tasks. This is designed to provide a unique environment where scientists can also study novel social interactions while the monkeys are learning, which is currently not possible with traditional methods. Their study has been published in the journal elife.“The setup consists, among other things, of a naturalistic group housing chamber and a behaviour room where monkeys could perform tasks on a touchscreen workstation. The monkeys were trained to voluntarily position their heads on a chin rest to learn and perform complex cognitive tasks,” the IISc said.Science and learningAside from just building a nice animal-friendly naturalistic lab, Arun and team also solved some major technical challenges. “First, we had to design a touchscreen workstation where monkeys can perform complex tasks in return for a juice reward. The second challenge was getting an accurate gaze. We saw that monkeys bring their head to the same position each time to drink juice. So, we developed modular head/chin supports to stabilise their head. This and our custom eye-tracker setup gave us great gaze signals,” Arun said.To understand what was possible, they trained the monkeys to perform a ‘same-different task’ — to decide whether two things are the same or not.“We trained the monkeys to do such a task and obtained remarkable gaze tracking despite the fact that monkeys are basically unrestrained and freely engaging with the touchscreen or moving away at their own will,” Arun added. medium89729839Describing the novel approach to training animals on the ‘same-different task’ — which they term ‘tailored automated training’ or TAT — the scientists explained: “In the traditional paradigm, before any task training can be started, monkeys have to be gradually acclimated to entering specialised monkey chairs that block them from access to their head, and to having their head immobilised using headposts for the purpose of eye tracking. This process can take a few months and therefore is a major bottleneck in training. These steps are no longer required in our environment, allowing us to focus entirely on task-relevant training.”They trained two monkeys (M1 and M3) using TAT. The fundamental approach to training monkeys on complex tasks is to take the animal through several stages of gradual training so that at every stage, the animal is performing above chance, while at the same time learning continuously.“In each session, we gave access to the touchscreen workstation to each monkey individually by separating it from its group using the holding areas. Each monkey was guided automatically through increasingly complex stages of the same-different task. These stages went from a basic task where the monkey received a reward for touching/holding a target square on the screen, to the full same-different task described in the previous sections,” the scientists said. medium89729858Importantly, each monkey, they said, went through a unique trajectory of learning that was tailored to its competence on each stage. There were 10 stages and multiple levels within each stage. Only one task-related parameter was varied across levels in any given stage.“The monkey would progress to the next level once it completed the most recent 50 trials with at least 80% accuracy. By the end of the training, both monkeys were highly accurate on the same-different task (91% for M1, 82% for M3). The duration of training from completely naive to fully trained was approximately 90 sessions or days. Thus, the tailored automated training paradigm deployed in this naturalistic environment can enable automated training of monkeys on complex cognitive tasks while at the same time maximising animal welfare,” the scientists said.Untrained monkeysReiterating that it could take several months to make monkeys learn such complex cognitive tasks, Arun said the team decided to check if untrained monkeys could learn from those they had trained.“Our novel environment has the provision to allow multiple monkeys to freely move and access the touchscreen workstation. Therefore, we wondered whether a naive monkey could learn the same-different task by observing trained monkeys. This would further obviate the need for the TAT paradigm by allowing monkeys to learn from each other, and potentially reduce human involvement,” he said. medium89728380As proof of novel exciting behaviours that could be observed in this facility, the scientists let untrained monkeys (M2 and M4) into the behaviour room with trained monkeys (M1 and M3) as they thought they could take advantage of their setup to let naive animals observe trained animals doing the task and see if they will learn it on their own.“This worked great,” Arun said, adding that M2 learned the task by observing M1 and M3.To explore this possibility, they performed social learning experiments on two naive monkeys (M2 and M4). In each case, the naive monkey was introduced along with a trained monkey (M1/M3) into the behaviour room, giving it the opportunity to learn by observation. Each day of social training for M2 involved three sessions in which he was first introduced into the behaviour room along with M1, then introduced together with M3, and finally a solo session. For M4’s social training, they included a social session with M3 and a solo session. Neither monkey was acquainted with the setup at all prior to this.“By Day 5, M2 had learned the basic task structure. By Day 9, M2 was performing at chance. By Day 21, M2 had learned the same-different rule. We also tried training another naive monkey (M4) to learn by watching trained monkeys. All this shows that our lab can reveal novel social behaviours that would not have been observed in the traditional setup,” Arun added.Untitled Carousel 85211350