The study is "very elegant," says Sabine Kastner, an attention researcher at Princeton University who didn't work on the study. But the findings can't really be used to discredit the use of the macaque brain model, she says. "There is a wealth of evidence that the macaque is an excellent model for attention research in general." Robert Desimone, a neuroscientist at MIT, agrees. A lot of studies suggest that there are numerous similarities across both species, he says.