Researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN) have published a database of readings from a monkey brain, which could reduce the number of primates needed in research.
The team recorded information from 1024 areas in the visual cortex - the brain region which processes vision - from two macaques, as they performed visual tasks on a screen.
All the readings are presented in a format which makes it possible for other researchers to access their work, without needing to repeat the experiments. The dataset can be found in Scientific Data.
“This dataset allows other scientists to derive new fundamental neuroscientific insights into underlying activity that influences the processing of visual information in our brain,’’ says Dr Xing Chen, lead author of the study.