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You are not alone: ​​monkeys also drown under pressure

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The team designed the cursor game to be challenging for monkeys but easy to study. The cameras to track the movement followed the movement of the monkey’s arm, which controlled the point on the screen. The game itself was the same every time. The researchers thought that differences in speed, position, and accuracy could only arise from a tested variable: reward.

Monkeys learned to anticipate particular rewards with visual cues on a computer screen; with each award came goals of different colors. Earl and the others performed brilliantly during training, when they didn’t earn anything for failing or when they got small drinks for success. They performed a little better when they thought they would double or triple. If this trend continues, a weird jackpot (a drink that is 10 times higher than the average prize) should motivate even better performance. The jackpot did the opposite. The monkeys ran much more successful races when it came to winning the huge prize. Earl drowned out 11 of his 11 jackpot chances.

To find a cause, Adam Smolder, a graduate student in the group, studied what was going on with the movements of the monkey’s arms in thousands of tests. Their reaction times and maximum velocities showed no clear trend. “The only consistency we really saw was that growth be careful“, Dio Chasek.

Imagine the gestures of the monkeys ’arms as a two-phase compound: the initial“ ballistic reach ”movement moves the cursor closer to the target, followed by a slower and more precise“ homing ”step to reach the target. Earl, Ford and Nelson fired more than once in the jackpot tests. Instead of starting as they normally did, with a fast ballistic reach that covered a lot of land, the reach would be cut short; the initial step was extended until the end of time.

“Monkeys are suffocating with great care,” says Batista. In humans, psychologists have linked it to paying for drowning also pay close attention to your movements, a behavior called explicit follow-up. Thinking about your movements slows them down. And he thinks that’s happening; the monkeys are psychologically coming out and coming out from under them. “If that’s not metacognition,” he says, “I don’t know what it is.”

One hypothesis as to why drowning causes big prizes is that making specific movements depends on a “neural sweet spot” for the prizes. Predictions of a higher reward may cause neurons to release more dopamine. At the right levels, dopamine helps keep your movements sharp. But if motivation jumps, a flood of neurotransmitters can flood the brain’s communication networks. “Few awards, we don’t work very well; too many awards, you don’t work very well, ”Chase says.

The new research does not determine a specific cause of drowning neurons, but it does set the stage for scientists to study neuroscience of high-performance performance with laboratory animals. In future experiments, having an animal model will make it easier to use electrodes to listen to conversations in the brain.

“Have they shown that this is the only way to drown humans or animals? No, but it is one Beilock says the picture of the systems below is important because different regions may be involved depending on the situation. Assuming these details return to humans, it could explain how different regions of the brain cause different types of suffocation. a mere cognitive work would be like forgetting the answers in a work conversation.The regions of the brain involved in each situation may overlap, but they may be separate and worth exploring.

Rob Gray, a sports psychologist at Arizona State University who studies how pressure affects human performance, says monkey data looks a lot like the explicit monitoring of drowning athletes. “That kind of no-feed movement is expected when you try to consciously control things from above,” he says. It is paralysis through analysis: “You are micromanaging your body.”

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