Macaque monkeys are widely used to study the neural basis of cognition. In the traditional approach, the monkey is brought into a lab to perform tasks while it is restrained to obtain stable gaze tracking and neural recordings. This unnatural setting prevents studying brain activity during natural, social and complex behaviors. Here, we designed a naturalistic environment with an integrated behavioral workstation that enables complex task training with viable gaze tracking in freely moving monkeys. We used this facility to train monkeys on a challenging same-different task. Remarkably, this facility enabled a naive monkey to learn the task merely by observing trained monkeys. This social training was faster primarily because the naive monkey first learned the task structure and then the same-different rule. We propose that such hybrid environments can be used to study brain activity during natural behaviors as well as during controlled cognitive tasks.

中文翻译：

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研究自由活动猴子自然社交行为和认知任务的自然环境

猕猴被广泛用于研究认知的神经基础。在传统方法中，将猴子带入实验室执行任务，同时限制了猴子获得稳定的凝视跟踪和神经记录的能力。这种不自然的环境阻止了在自然，社交和复杂行为过程中研究大脑活动。在这里，我们设计了一个具有集成行为工作站的自然环境，该工作站可以对自由移动的猴子进行可行的注视跟踪，从而进行复杂的任务训练。我们使用此工具训练猴子完成一项具有挑战性的同等任务。值得注意的是，此功能使幼稚的猴子仅通过观察训练有素的猴子就可以学习任务。这种社交训练的速度更快，主要是因为幼稚的猴子首先学习了任务结构，然后学习了相同的规则。