For some time, behavioral scientists have noted how monkeys with diverse personalities can carry out behavioral tasks differently. Now for the first time, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have observed differences in neuron activity that relate to the various strategies that individual monkeys use to reach out to a target.
To do this, neuroscientist Daniel Moran and his doctoral student, Thomas Pearce, designed a variation of a classic experiment used for studying voluntary motor control. In the center-out-task, rhesus macaques are trained to use a hand to reach out to a target from a center position. To do so, the monkey’s neurons needs to encode three types of information: where its hand is, where it wants to go, and the path it needs to take to get there.
This latter piece of information is a velocity vector. If there is no obstacle directly between the target and the ...
