Researchers recorded eye movements and brain activity in people and two rhesus macaques as they watched movies and video clips, including excerpts of Despicable Me, to study how primate brains extract meaning from visual scenes, 404 Media reported on Friday¹.

The work was led by Vinay Raghavan of the City College of New York¹. 404 Media summarized the study as part of a weekly research roundup and did not name the journal or whether the paper is peer-reviewed¹.

One group of human volunteers wore scalp EEG electrodes and watched feature films, including The Big Sick, Whiplash, and Room, with instructions to watch as they normally would¹. A separate intracranial dataset included several human patients and two macaques with electrodes inside the skull; that group watched shorter videos, among them 10-minute Despicable Me clips in English and Hungarian, a 4.3-minute clip of the short film The Present, and three 5-minute macaque documentaries¹.

Taken together, the recordings pointed to neural responses when new semantic or conceptual information appeared across short gaze fixations, 404 Media said, with activity in brain regions beyond those classically tied to vision¹. The team argued that visual processing is continuous across glances rather than a string of independent snapshots¹.

The macaque sample is two animals, and 404 Media did not report how many people were in each human dataset¹. What the monkeys understood of Minions, the write-up noted, remains unknown¹.

Not medical advice.