Chimps Show Up University Students In Memory Test

Boston (dbtechno) - Scientists say that chimpanzees have “photographic memories” and may even have faster short term memory recall than adult humans.

Reported in current issue of the journal Biology, researchers from Kyoto University in Japan pitted a 3 female chimps and their off-spring against a group of university students.

Each group was shown numbers between 1 and 9 on a touch screen. After a breif moment the numbers were than replaced with blank squares and the participates had to remember where each number was.

The three younger chimps were able to remember where many of the numbers were, even after a brief glance.

The youngest chimps performed better than both their mothers and the university students, the AP reported.

The university students tended to become less accurate as the time between when the numbers were shown and the blank squares were shown was decreased.

Researchers concluded that although the chimps were not more accurate than humans, they could memorize faster.

Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa, from Kyoto University, who led the research, said: “There are still many people, including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions.

“No-one can imagine that chimpanzees - young chimpanzees at the age of five - have a better performance in a memory task than humans. Here we show for the first time that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection - better than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus, following the same procedure.”

One chimp tested proved to be especially talented.

In a second test Ayumu the chimp was able to remember the location of 80 percent of the numbers which were only shown for seven-tenths of a second.

“The limited-hold memory task provided a means of performing an objective comparison between the two species under exactly identical conditions,” the report explained. “Our present study shows that young chimpanzees can quickly grasp many numerals at a glance, with no decline in performance as the hold duration is varied.”

Matsuzawa said the findings challenged the assumption of many scientists that “humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions.”