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Updated: May 28, 2025

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
Published on: April 19, 2017
Monkeys can identify pictures from words.
Elizabeth Cabrera-Ruiz1,2, Marlen Alva1, Mario Treviño3
1Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Instituto de Fisiología Celular, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, México.
Rhesus monkeys can learn cross-modal associations between sounds and pictures, demonstrating working memory and generalization abilities. This research highlights their potential as a model for studying brain pathways of auditory-visual object associations.
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Area of Science:
- Cognitive neuroscience
- Primate behavior
- Cross-modal perception
Background:
- Humans form cross-modal associations between auditory and visual stimuli.
- The capacity for nonhuman primates to learn word-picture associations is not well understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if rhesus macaques can learn cross-modal associations between sounds and pictures.
- To assess their working memory and generalization capabilities in this task.
Main Methods:
- Two rhesus macaques were trained on a delayed cross-modal match-to-sample task.
- Monkeys matched sounds (vocalizations, words) to corresponding pictures on a touchscreen after a delay.
Main Results:
- Monkeys successfully learned over a dozen sound-picture associations.
- Performance remained high when exposed to sounds from different individuals, indicating generalization.
Conclusions:
- Rhesus monkeys can learn and generalize cross-modal associations between different object types.
- They possess working memory crucial for retaining auditory information.
- These findings support rhesus monkeys as a valuable model for studying cross-modal association pathways in the brain.