Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 110, Issue 47, Pages 19000-19005Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1312648110
Keywords
evolution; Snake Detection Theory; visual responses; low-pass filtered images
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Funding
- Asian Core Program, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
- Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) [25290005]
- National Bio-Resource Project Japanese Monkeys of the MEXT, Japan
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Snakes and their relationships with humans and other primates have attracted broad attention from multiple fields of study, but not, surprisingly, from neuroscience, despite the involvement of the visual system and strong behavioral and physiological evidence that humans and other primates can detect snakes faster than innocuous objects. Here, we report the existence of neurons in the primate medial and dorsolateral pulvinar that respond selectively to visual images of snakes. Compared with three other categories of stimuli (monkey faces, monkey hands, and geometrical shapes), snakes elicited the strongest, fastest responses, and the responses were not reduced by low spatial filtering. These findings integrate neuroscience with evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, herpetology, and primatology by identifying a neurobiological basis for primates' heightened visual sensitivity to snakes, and adding a crucial component to the growing evolutionary perspective that snakes have long shaped our primate lineage.
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