Marmoset Monkeys Model Human Infant Gaze?

Macaque monkeys exhibit behavior similar to human adults while freely viewing video stimuli. However, the relationship to human infants has not been explored. Method: This paper compares published results from four datasets including novel analysis. We summarize reports comparing human infants to adults Franchak et al. [1], human adults to (adult) macaque monkeys Shepherd et al. [2], Berg et al. [3], and human adults versus macaque and marmoset monkey behavior Chen et al. [4]. Results: Bottom-up models of visual attention (“saliency map”) predict gaze at similar rates for all species and age-groups. However, when there are multiple salient targets, human adults and human infants over 12 months tend to look at the same target. In contrast, marmoset monkeys, like human infants under 9 months, look among many of the salient targets. Macaque behavior is in between, leaning towards human adult behavior. Conclusion: looking behavior of humans over 12 months and macaques is influenced by top-down control that selects among salient targets, whereas infant and marmoset behavior is not.