"Monkeys assign value in much the way humans do when making economic choices," reports The Straits Times on a study to be published in the journal Science:
The monkeys played a game in which they chose a red or green circle, the study said. [They] were sporadically given a reward of juice, and they had to adjust their decision making as the results changed unpredictably over the rounds.
After observing tens of thousands of monkey games, Stanford University professor Leo Sugrue and colleagues determined that monkeys used a strategy that considers the reward from past choices and estimates the likelihood of a reward when picking red or green.
This thought process is similar to how an investor looks at investment performance and chooses where to place his money, the study said.
The study found monkeys made their choices and tracked the value of each decision from round to round in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex.
Banana futures, anyone?
[via MonkeyWatch]
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