Animal models of the human brain: Successes, limitations, and alternatives

Abstract

The last three decades of research in human cognitive neuroscience have given us an initial “parts list” for the human mind in the form of a set of cortical regions with distinct and often very specific functions. But current neuroscientific methods in humans have limited ability to reveal exactly what these regions represent and compute, the causal role of each in behavior, and the interactions among regions that produce real-world cognition. Animal models can help to answer these questions when homologues exist in other species, like the face system in macaques. When homologues do not exist in animals, for example for speech and music perception, and understanding of language or other people's thoughts, intracranial recordings in humans play a central role, along with a new alternative to animal models: artificial neural networks.