A Touchscreen-Based, Multiple-Choice Approach to Cognitive Enrichment of Captive Rhesus Macaques ().

Research on the psychological and physiological well-being of captive animals has focused on investigating different types of social and structural enrichment. Consequently, cognitive enrichment has been understudied, despite the promising external validity, comparability, and applicability. As we aim to fill this gap, we developed an interactive, multiple-choice interface for cage-mounted touchscreen devices that rhesus monkeys () can freely interact with, from within their home enclosure at the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory of the German Primate Center.

Electrophysiological dataset from macaque visual cortical area MST in response to a novel motion stimulus.

Establishing the cortical neural representation of visual stimuli is a central challenge of systems neuroscience. Publicly available data would allow a broad range of scientific analyses and hypothesis testing, but are rare and largely focused on the early visual system. To address the shortage of open data from higher visual areas, we provide a comprehensive dataset from a neurophysiology study in macaque monkey visual cortex that includes a complete record of extracellular action potential recordings from the extrastriate medial superior temporal (MST) area, behavioral data, and detailed stimulus records.

The Dot-Probe Attention Bias Task as a Method to Assess Psychological Well-Being after Anesthesia: A Study with Adult Female Long-Tailed Macaques (Macaca fascicularis).

Understanding the impact routine research and laboratory procedures have on animals is crucial to improving their well-being and to the success and reproducibility of the research they are involved in. Cognitive measures of welfare offer insight into animals' internal psychological state, but require validation. Attention bias - the tendency to attend to one type of information over another - is a cognitive phenomenon documented in humans and animals that is known to be modulated by affective state (i.

Toward a Standardized Test of Fearful Temperament in Primates: A Sensitive Alternative to the Human Intruder Task for Laboratory-Housed Rhesus Macaques ().

Standardized and sensitive tests to assess differences in temperament among primates housed in captivity are essential for monitoring welfare and improving science outcomes through reduced noise in data. Fearful temperament in primates has traditionally been assessed using the Human Intruder Test (HIT) in which duration of bodily freeze in response to approach by an unknown human is measured. The HIT is susceptible to variation between facilities in execution, interpretation of data and could be stressful for animals with more fearful temperaments.

A cage-based training, cognitive testing and enrichment system optimized for rhesus macaques in neuroscience research.

In neurophysiological studies with awake non-human primates (NHP), it is typically necessary to train the animals over a prolonged period of time on a behavioral paradigm before the actual data collection takes place. Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) are the most widely used primate animal models in system neuroscience. Inspired by existing joystick- or touch-screen-based systems designed for a variety of monkey species, we built and successfully employed a stand-alone cage-based training and testing system for rhesus monkeys (eXperimental Behavioral Intrument, XBI).

Monkeys spontaneously discriminate their unfamiliar paternal kin under natural conditions using facial cues.

Kin recognition can enhance inclusive fitness via nepotism and optimal outbreeding. Mechanisms allowing recognition of patrilineal relatives are of particular interest in species in which females mate promiscuously, leading to paternity uncertainty. Humans are known to detect facial similarities between kin in the faces of third parties, and there is some evidence for continuity of this ability in nonhuman primates .