Dr. Janata's research into music and memory featured in Wall Street Journal Online
Yucui Chen, Weiwei Zhang, and Zheng Shen (2002)
Shape predominant effect in pattern recognition of geometric figures of rhesus monkey.
Vision Res 42(7):865-71.
Three monkeys were trained successively with discrimination, concurrent matchingto sample, and sameness-difference judgment tasks in which learning curves were compared. Then, the display duration for the stimuli was shortened to 100, 50, and 30 ms respectively to test the changes in accuracy and reaction time. All results in three experimental paradigms suggested consistently that the geometric shape (triangle, circle, and square) plays a more predominant role than topological features (the hole inside of a figure and the hole numbers) in monkey figure recognition. The results are different from the experiment by human subjects who presented hole predominant in figure recognition. Therefore, the precedence in perception depends on subject species, stimulus set, and ecological significance of the perceiving process.
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Link to PubMed entry
Exploring the Mind Speaker Series - Dr. Paul Ekman, UC San Francisco