Snakes on a Visual Plane | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views
www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38053/title/Snakes-on-a-Visual-Plane/
snakes research brain science
shared by grayton downing on 29 Oct 13
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primates have a remarkable ability to detect snakes, even in a chaotic visual environment.
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recorded pulvinar neuronal activity via electrodes implanted into the brains of two adult macaques—one male, one female—as they were shown images of monkey faces, monkey hands, geometric shapes, and snakes. The brains of both monkeys—which were raised at a national monkey farm in Amami Island, Japan, and had no known encounters with snakes before the experiment—showed preferential activity of neurons in the medial and dorsolateral pulvinar to images of snakes, as compared with the other stimuli. Further, snakes elicited the fastest and strongest responses from these neurons.
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neurobiological evidence of pulvinar neuron responses to a potential predation threat is convincing, Dobson noted more work is needed to support a role for snakes in primate evolution.
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“fear module” in the primate brain—a construct that enables “quick responses to stimuli that signal danger, such as predators and threatening faces”
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“Since they [the authors] haven’t—to my knowledge—tested the same stimuli on various other parts of the visual system, they don’t have evidence that these putatively selective cells are a specialization of the ‘fear module’ at all,”