Turning traditional neurophysiology on its head: A naturalistic environment to study natural behaviors and cognitive tasks in freely moving monkeys

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.