Code & documentation reporting results obtained when working on a project named "Gaze-following in nonhuman primates" under the supervision of Prof. Peter Thier, Masih Shafiei and Marius Görner at University of Tübingen.
Gaze serves as an important communicative cue across different taxa. However, studies suggest that due to the distinctive features of human eyes, especially white sclera, only human primates may exhibit equal sensitivity to head cues as to eye movement cues alone. In this study, we investigate how the gaze-following abilities of rhesus monkeys differ between two experimental conditions presenting social cues (head-and-eye and eye only) in a modified Posner attentional task. Our findings indicate that, in both conditions, performance in congruent trials surpasses that in incongruent trials. As expected, this effect is more pronounced in the head-and-eye condition. Additionally, we are broadening our exploration by examining potential biases in horizontal eye position before correct response initiation and developing an algorithm for microsaccade detection that could more precisely address our research questions.
|-- LICENSE
|-- README.md
|-- figures
|-- Monkey E
| |-- horizontal_bias
| |-- microsaccade_detection
| |-- performance_analysis
|-- Monkey J
| |-- perceptual_thresholdI would like to emphasize my sincere gratitude to all of my supervisors. First, big thanks to Prof. Dr. Peter Thier for his interest in starting collaboration with me and his discernment in my passion for his research. Second, my heartfelt thanks extend to Masih Shafiei for his dedicated guidance, particularly in acclimating me to the monkey laboratory and fostering collaborative coding sessions. His innovative ideas has been instrumental in shaping my approach to the research. Third, a debt of gratitude is also owed to Marius Görner for his unwavering assistance in data analysis, sharing his previous work with me and his patient responsiveness to my persistent inquiries. Due to limited time of my rotation, I could not collect much of the data and thus, I extend special thanks to Lena Hoeppe and Constanza Bravo-Rossainz-Baez for their indispensable roles in data collection, without which all of the results would not have materialized.