{"doi":"10.1101/2020.10.19.345561","title":"Brain organization, not size alone, as key to high-level vision: Evidence from marmoset monkeys","abstract":"Bigger brains are thought to support richer abilities, including perceptual abilities. But bigger brains are typically organized differently (e.g., with more cortical areas). Thus, the extent to which a neural system’s size versus organization underlies complex abilities remains unclear. The marmoset monkey is evolutionarily peculiar: it has a small brain, yet many cortical areas. We used this natural experiment to test organization as source of high-level visual abilities independent of size, via large-scale psychophysics comparing marmosets to different species on identical tasks. Marmosets far out—performed rats—a marmoset-sized rodent—on a simple visual recognition task. On another visual task, which is difficult for both humans and machines, marmosets achieved high performance. Strikingly, their image-by-image behavior revealed that they did so in a manner highly similar to humans—marmosets were nearly as human-like as were macaques. These results suggest a key role for brain organization—not simply size—in the evolution of sophisticated abilities.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2020,"id":121439,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":7,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9434,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":561378,"name":"Sophie L. Bokor","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":561379,"name":"You-Nah Jeon","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":561380,"name":"Tahereh Toosi","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":560901,"name":"Elias B. Issa","orcid":"0000-0002-5387-7207","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":313100,"name":"Alexander J.E. Kell","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":61,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:14:42.734024Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}