Macaques demonstrate human-like skill by associating words with pictures

A team of cognitive neuroscientists at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, working with colleagues from Instituto Nacional de Rehabilitacion, Universidad de Guadalajara, all in Mexico, and Baylor College of Medicine, in the U.S., has found evidence suggesting that macaques form associations between words and pictures.

In their study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, the group conducted a series of experiments with captive macaques to see if they could form associations between sounds and images shown on a computer screen.

Prior research has shown that many animals are capable of associating a certain type of sound—a bug buzzing by, for example—with one of the many creatures that may have created the sound. But associating an audible label, such as “fly,” or “mosquito,” with a given sound takes things to another level.

Neuroscientists call it cross-modal association and, for a long time, assumed that humans were the only creatures able to make such associations. In this new effort, the researchers found that macaques make such associations, suggesting there may be many other animals with the ability.

The work involved playing spoken human words or vocalizations by monkeys to several individual macaques. After each sound was played, the macaque was shown a picture of the item mentioned by the human voice, an apple, for example.

After repeating the exercise several times with several macaques, allowing them to make an association between the sound spoken and the image that was displayed, the researchers played the same words or vocalizations by a different person or monkey to see if the macaques responded to them in the same ways.

The researchers found that the macaques did respond in much the same ways, suggesting they had made associations between the picture of the object and the actual meaning behind the word, and not the way it sounded.

The research team also noted that younger macaques tended to make the associations more quickly than their older test mates. The group plans to continue their work with the macaques to find out if their ability to make such associations is impacted by their ability to vocalize the label associated with an image.

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