Behavioral evidence for memory replay of video episodes in the macaque

Humans recall the past by replaying fragments of events temporally. Here, we demonstrate a similar effect in macaques. We trained six rhesus monkeys with a temporal-order judgement (TOJ) task and collected 5000 TOJ trials. In each trial, the monkeys watched a naturalistic video of about 10 s compris...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shuzhen Zuo, Lei Wang, Jung Han Shin, Yudian Cai, Boqiang Zhang, Sang Wan Lee, Kofi Appiah, Yong-di Zhou, Sze Chai Kwok
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: eLife Sciences Publications Ltd 2020-04-01
Series:eLife
Subjects:
Online Access:https://elifesciences.org/articles/54519
Description
Summary:Humans recall the past by replaying fragments of events temporally. Here, we demonstrate a similar effect in macaques. We trained six rhesus monkeys with a temporal-order judgement (TOJ) task and collected 5000 TOJ trials. In each trial, the monkeys watched a naturalistic video of about 10 s comprising two across-context clips, and after a 2 s delay, performed TOJ between two frames from the video. The data are suggestive of a non-linear, time-compressed forward memory replay mechanism in the macaque. In contrast with humans, such compression of replay is, however, not sophisticated enough to allow these monkeys to skip over irrelevant information by compressing the encoded video globally. We also reveal that the monkeys detect event contextual boundaries, and that such detection facilitates recall by increasing the rate of information accumulation. Demonstration of a time-compressed, forward replay-like pattern in the macaque provides insights into the evolution of episodic memory in our lineage.
ISSN:2050-084X