Interspecies comparisons are key to deriving an understanding of the behavioral and neural correlates of human cognition from animal models. We perform a detailed comparison of the strategies of female macaque monkeys to male and female humans on a variant of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), a widely studied and applied task that provides a multiattribute measure of cognitive function and depends on the frontal lobe. WCST performance requires the inference of a rule change given ambiguous feedback. We found that well-trained monkeys infer new rules three times more slowly than minimally instructed humans. Input-dependent hidden Markov model–generalized linear models were fit to their choices, revealing hidden states akin to feature-based attention in both species. Decision processes resembled a win–stay, lose–shift strategy with interspecies similarities as well as key differences. Monkeys and humans both test multiple rule hypotheses over a series of rule-search trials and perform inference-like computations to exclude candidate choice options. We quantitatively show that perseveration, random exploration, and poor sensitivity to negative feedback account for the slower task-switching performance in monkeys.

种间比较是从动物模型中了解人类认知的行为和神经相关性的关键。我们通过威斯康星卡片分类测试（WCST）的变体对雌性猕猴与雄性和雌性人类的策略进行了详细比较，这是一项广泛研究和应用的任务，提供了认知功能的多属性测量，并且依赖于额叶。 WCST 性能需要在给出不明确反馈的情况下推断规则更改。我们发现，训练有素的猴子推断新规则的速度比受过最低限度指导的人类慢三倍。输入依赖的隐马尔可夫模型——广义线性模型适合他们的选择，揭示了类似于两个物种基于特征的注意力的隐藏状态。决策过程类似于赢-留下、输-转移策略，具有物种间的相似性和关键差异。猴子和人类都通过一系列规则搜索试验来测试多个规则假设，并执行类似推理的计算以排除候选选择选项。我们定量地表明，毅力、随机探索和对负反馈的敏感性较差是猴子任务切换表现较慢的原因。