Aspies For Freedom

Monkeys Pay to See Female Monkey Bottoms
By Robert Roy Britt

Would you pay to see a monkey's backside? I hope not. Monkeys will, and I guess that's okay, though it sounds awfully close to the sort of thing that lands guys in jail here in the human realm.

A new study found that male monkeys will give up their juice rewards in order to ogle pictures of female monkey's bottoms. The way the experiment was set up, the act is akin to paying for the images, the researchers say.

The rhesus macaque monkeys also splurged on photos of top-dog counterparts, the high-ranking primates. Maybe that's like you or me buying People magazine.

The research, which will be detailed in the March issue of Current Biology, gets more interesting.

The scientists actually had to pay these guys, in the form of extra juice, to get them to look at images of lower-ranking monkeys.

Curiously, the monkeys in the test hadn't had any direct physical contact with the monkeys in the photos, so they didn't have personal experience with who was hot and who was not.

"So, somehow, they are getting this information by observation -- by seeing other individuals interact," said Michael Platt of the Duke University Medical Center.

Next, Platt and his colleagues want to see how people will perform in a similar experiment.

"At the moment, it's only a tantalizing possibility, but we believe that similar processes are at work in these monkeys and in people," Platt said. "After all, the same kinds of social conditions have been important in primate evolution for both nonhuman primates and humans. So, in further experiments, we also want to try to establish in the same way how people attribute value to acquiring visual information about other individuals."

The study, announced Friday, is far from monkey business. It was sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Cure Autism Now Foundation. The goal is to learn more about the social machinery of the brain with an eye toward helping autism patients.

"One of the main problems in people with autism is that they don't find it very motivating to look at other individuals," Platt said. "And even when they do, they can't seem to assess information about that individual's importance, intentions or expressions."

The monkeys provide "an excellent model for how social motivation for looking is processed in normal individuals," Platt said. "And, it's a model that we can use to explore the neurophysiological mechanisms of those motivations in a way we can't do in humans. For example, we can use drugs that affect specific neural processes to explore whether we can mimic some of the deficits found in autism in these animals."
http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/0...iness.html

I guess it really only goes to show how much of NT behavior is rooted in monkeys.  

Autistics are less monkey like  than the NTs.

Maybe i'm just confused here but - what is wrong with not being socially influenced to look at lady's bottoms?

ah, i know: it's more normal
...

Okay let's put this in perspective. Here in New Orleans thousands of tourists come to Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras to either expose themselves or convince others to expose themselves for cheap plastic beads. Is this something to which autistics should aspire?

I hope not *shudder*

I will have to remember that Cure Autism Now funded a study on monkey bums for future reference.  People should know where their charity money is going.

Purely for what it says about monkey behaviour, though, you have to admit it's funny. (and interesting -- I'm always interested in stories about animal intelligence.)

CAN's experiments in this regard simply support my hypothesis that humans are not the most interesting animal in the world.

So anyway, let me get this straight. The next thing they'll be prescribing after all those experiments is a daily dose of butt-viewing.

How would you like to forced into participating in experiments?  You have to be strapped into a MRI machine.  You have to be bored all day and you can give up your juice box to have a little fun looking at some opposite sex butt.  In the wild, you could look at monkey butt all day and get your own juice.  

Doing experiments like this on monkeys is really stupid and needless.  
The monkeys do not volunteer for these experiments and some animals are even killed and dissected in the end.

That is exactly why experimenting on monkeys is ridiculous because human behaviours are so much different.  I guess to homo monkey will get all the juice and maybe he gets to sit in the box with the other male monkeys and looks at their butts all day.  I don't know because I am not an monkey.  The point is that the monkeys have no choice in participating in these experiments.  Maybe they throw their sh*t at the researchers.  I remember the gorillas at the zoo used to do the same thing until they let them paint.  

Anyway,  CAN funds silly and bad animal research.  

Why do I have an American spelling program here?  It is underlining behaviours and I do not spell it behaviors.  I don't use neighbor, favorite either.  I want my British spelling.

I find american spelling rather odd, What is wrong with putting a 'u' into words like colour. Color just looks wrong.

I'm told that I should stick to either american or british, but I honestly don't care wich one I write. I just say that candy is another word for sweets.

<- had his 500th post today, and is the top poster

If you go to CAN's website you can read all about the stupid and even cruel experiments they are funding.  Some of them are being done of volunteer humans and children.  If you can say the children have really volunteered or just their parents have offered them up.

Yes well, stupidity and misinterpreting results for their agenda (or selectively quoting statistics) are commonplace.

agreed...