Primate Neuroethology

About this book

Why do people find monkeys and apes so compelling to watch? One clear answer is that they seem so similar to us – a window into our own minds and how we have evolved over millennia. As Charles Darwin wrote in his Notebook, “He who understands baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke.” Darwin recognized that behavior and cognition, and the neural architecture that support them, evolved to solve specific social and ecological problems. Defining these problems for neurobiological study, and conveying neurobiological results to ethologists and psychologists, is fundamental to an evolutionary understanding of brain and behavior.

The goal of Primate Neuroethology is to do just that. It collects, for the first time in a single book, information on primate behavior and cognition, neurobiology, and the emerging discipline of neuroethology. Here leading scientists in several fields review work ranging from primate foraging behavior to the neurophysiology of motor control, from vocal communication to the functions of the auditory cortex. The resulting synthesis of cognitive, ethological, and neurobiological approaches to primate behavior yields a richer understanding of our primate cousins that also sheds light on the evolutionary development of human behavior and cognition.

Contents

1. Michael L. Platt and Asif A. Ghazanfar: Introduction
2. Matt Cartmill: Primate Classification and Diversity
3. Daniel Schmitt: Primate Locomotor Evolution: Biomechanical Studies of Primate Locomotion and Their Implications for Understanding Primate Neuroethology
4. Klaus Zuberbu¨hler and Karline Janmaat: Foraging Cognition in Nonhuman Primates
5. Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney: Primate Vocal Communication
6. Jeffrey R. Stevens: Rational Decision Making in Primates: The Bounded and the Ecological
7. Alexandra G. Rosati, Laurie R. Santos and Brian Hare: Primate Social Cognition: Thirty Years After Premack and Woodruff
8. Elizabeth M. Brannon, Kerry E. Jordan and Sarah M. Jones: Behavioral Signatures of Numerical Cognition
9. Herbert Gintis: The Foundations of Transdisciplinary Behavioral Science
10. Jon H. Kaas: Sensory and Motor Systems in Primates
11. Benjamin Y. Hayden: Vision: A Neuroethological Perspective
12. Tirin Moore, Robert J. Schafer and Behrad Noudoost: Circuits of Visual Attention
13. Cory T. Miller and Yale E. Cohen: Vocalizations as Auditory Objects: Behavior and Neurophysiology
14. Nicholas G. Hatsopoulos, Maryam Saleh, and Julian A. Mattiello: Encoding and Beyond in the Motor Cortex
15. Jennifer M. Groh and Dinesh K. Pai: Looking at Sounds: Neural Mechanisms in the Primate Brain
16. Katalin M. Gothard and Kari L. Hoffman: Circuits of Emotion in the Primate Brain
17. Wolfram Schultz: Neurophysiological Correlates of Reward Learning
18. Yuji Naya and Wendy A. Suzuki: Associative Memory in the Medial Temporal Lobe
19. Dario Maestripieri: Neurobiology of Social Behavior
20. Andreas Nieder: Neural Bases of Numerical Cognition
21. Jonathan D. Wallis: Executive Control Circuits
22. Todd M. Preuss: Reinventing Primate Neuroscience for the Twenty-First Century
23. Michael S. A. Graziano: Ethologically Relevant Movements Mapped on the Motor Cortex
24. Doris Y. Tsao, Charles F. Cadieu, and Margaret S. Livingstone: Object Recognition: Physiological and Computational Insights
25. Lizabeth M. Romanski and Asif A. Ghazanfar: The Primate Frontal and Temporal Lobes and Their Role in Multisensory Vocal Communication
26. Stephen V. Shepherd and Michael L. Platt: Neuroethology of Attention in Primates
27. Daeyeol Lee: Neuroethology of Decision Making
28. Louise Barrett and Drew Rendall: Out of Our Minds: The Neuroethology of Primate Strategic Behavior
29. William D. Hopkins: The Comparative Neuropsychology of Tool Use in Primates with Specific Reference to Chimpanzees and Capuchin Monkeys
30. Atsushi Iriki, Yumiko Yamazaki, and Osamu Sakura: Evolution of an Intellectual Mind in the Primate Brain

Biography

Michael L. Platt, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Asif A. Ghazanfar, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Neuroscience Institute and Departments of Psychology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University.