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Handbook of Squirrel Monkey Research pp 271–293Cite as

Visual System of the Squirrel Monkey

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Abstract

A few minutes’ casual observation of the arboreal acrobatics of a group of squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus) will serve to convince one that, as for other primates, the visual system provides these animals an extraordinarily important access to the environment. This intuition is confirmed through formal studies, which show that (1) a large portion of the neocortex in the squirrel monkey receives some visual inputs, and (2) squirrel monkeys can make keen discriminations among many features of their visual environments. This chapter reviews the literature on vision and the visual system of the squirrel monkey. To accomplish this, I first provide a sketch of the organization of the visual system, and then examine several functional features of vision that have been subjected to experimental scrutiny. Particular attention is paid to those cases where vision can be related to the anatomy and physiology of the visual system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, 93106, USA

    Gerald H. Jacobs

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  1. Gerald H. Jacobs
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Primate Behavior Laboratory and Department of Psychiatry, State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, 11203, Brooklyn, New York, USA

    Leonard A. Rosenblum

  2. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, 94305, Stanford, California, USA

    Christopher L. Coe

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Jacobs, G.H. (1985). Visual System of the Squirrel Monkey. In: Rosenblum, L.A., Coe, C.L. (eds) Handbook of Squirrel Monkey Research. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-0812-7_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-0812-7_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4757-0814-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4757-0812-7

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