Surprisingly complex behaviors "hard-wired" in primates

Surprisingly complex behaviors "hard-wired" in primates ››: Stepniewska et al. can produce "ethologically significant behaviours" by stimulating prosimian cortex, suggesting that the behaviours are pre-programmed routines. More destruction of human conceit. From the press release:

Scientists have long known that many of the behaviors of lower organisms are innate. In the insect world, for example, instinctive behaviors predominate. Birds have a larger repertoire of fixed behaviors than dogs.

In primates, voluntary or learned behavior predominates. So neuroscientists have assumed that in primate brains the hard-wiring is limited to simple movements and complex behaviors are all learned.

Now, however, studies are finding that a number of surprisingly complex behaviors appear to be built into the brains of primates as well. These are "biologically significant" behaviors that appear likely to improve the primate's ability to survive and reproduce. They include aggressive facial patterns, defensive forelimb movements, hand-to-mouth and reaching-and-grasping movements.

Nice work replicating others' experiments with macaques and thereby demonstrating conservation across the primates. But, frankly, what is actually surprising? "[N]euroscientists have assumed that in primate brains the hard-wiring is limited to simple movements" -- well more fool them for assuming! Complex behaviours like language learning, relentless and convoluted successional programs such as embryological development and puberty, invariant cognitive upscaling demonstrated by pre-pubertal milestoning like roll-sit-crawl-stand, well-characterised genetic influences on things like mate choice, human universals of behaviour and physiology such as reflexes and cognitive modules, culture-independent preferences for natural scenes of a particular type, universal illusions of perception (we all think our peripheral vision is in colour and that our visual field is uninterrupted), blind babies that smile at their primary carers -- given all that and more, what made you think that flinching or getting your hand to your mouth had to be learned behaviour rather than pre-loaded software in your cerebral substrate? Do you think this difficult trick is learned? You, me, all of us are not as complicated as we believe; we are embarrassingly simple software running on surprisingly complicated hardware. Original paper in PNAS (via); [Permalink…23-Mar-05…Deserving memes……Comments (0)]

Surprisingly complex behaviors "hard-wired" in primates

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