Publications by authors named "J Fizet"
Research methods in cognitive neuroscience using non-human primates have undergone notable changes over the last decades. Recently, several research groups have described freely accessible devices equipped with a touchscreen interface. Two characteristics of such systems are of particular interest: some apparatuses include automated identification of subjects, while others are mobile.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA review of the 5-Choice Serial Reaction Time (5-CSRT) task in different vertebrate models.
Neurosci Biobehav Rev
December 2016
Within cognitive and behavioural research, the 5-Choice Serial Reaction Time task is widely recognized as a valuable test of attention in rats. However, technical and methodological developments required for extending its usefulness are still at an early stage. In view of advances in knowledge about cognition and other areas of biology, issues surrounding attention are increasingly important, and appear to require new methodological approaches.
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- The protein-only hypothesis suggests that infectious prions are misfolded cellular prion proteins (PrPs) that form distinct strains with unique biological properties.
- Researchers aim to synthesize prions from known components to study infectivity and strain diversity at the atomic level, but achieving high-titre synthetic prions suitable for analysis remains challenging.
- In a study, the team tested around 20,000 conditions to produce these synthetic prions from recombinant mouse PrP, but found that infectious results were transient and largely non-reproducible, indicating that creating prions from recombinant sources may require more understanding of the structure of natural prions.
We review four studies investigating hand preferences for grasping versus pointing to objects at several spatial positions in human infants and three species of nonhuman primates using the same experimental setup. We expected that human infants and nonhuman primates present a comparable difference in their pattern of laterality according to tasks. We tested 6 capuchins, 6 macaques, 12 baboons, and 10 human infants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere are two conflicting hypotheses to explain the origins of language. Vocal origin theory states that language results from the gradual evolution of animals' vocal communication, but gestural origin theory considers that language evolved from gestures, with the initial left-hemispheric control of manual gestures gradually encompassing vocalizations. To contribute to this debate, we investigated functional hemispheric specialization related to hand biases when grasping or showing an object through manual gesture in Tonkean macaques.
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