Would you pay to see a monkey's backside? I hope not. Monkeys
will, and I guess that's okay, though it sounds awfully close to
the sort of thing that lands guys in jail here in the human
realm.
A new study found that male monkeys will give up their juice
rewards in order to ogle pictures of female monkey's bottoms. The
way the experiment was set up, the act is akin to paying for the
images, the researchers say.
The rhesus macaque monkeys also splurged on photos of top-dog
counterparts, the high-ranking primates. Maybe that's like you or
me buying People magazine.
The research, which will be detailed in the March issue of Current
Biology, gets more interesting.
The scientists actually had to pay these guys, in the form of extra
juice, to get them to look at images of lower-ranking
monkeys.
Curiously, the monkeys in the test hadn't had any direct physical
contact with the monkeys in the photos, so they didn't have
personal experience with who was hot and who was not.
"So, somehow, they are getting this information by observation --
by seeing other individuals interact," said Michael Platt of the
Duke University Medical Center.
Next, Platt and his colleagues want to see how people will perform
in a similar experiment.
"At the moment, it's only a tantalizing possibility, but we believe
that similar processes are at work in these monkeys and in people,"
Platt said. "After all, the same kinds of social conditions have
been important in primate evolution for both nonhuman primates and
humans. So, in further experiments, we also want to try to
establish in the same way how people attribute value to acquiring
visual information about other individuals."
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The study, announced Friday, is far from monkey business. It was
sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Cure
Autism Now Foundation. The goal is to learn more about the social
machinery of the brain with an eye toward helping autism
patients.
"One of the main problems in people with autism is that they don't
find it very motivating to look at other individuals," Platt said.
"And even when they do, they can't seem to assess information about
that individual's importance, intentions or expressions."
The monkeys provide "an excellent model for how social motivation
for looking is processed in normal individuals," Platt said. "And,
it's a model that we can use to explore the neurophysiological
mechanisms of those motivations in a way we can't do in humans. For
example, we can use drugs that affect specific neural processes to
explore whether we can mimic some of the deficits found in autism
in these animals."
Source:
http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/050128_monkey_business.html
