Chimp vs. Human - Chimps won!

Young chimps have been competed against university students in laboratory tests of working memory and unbelievablely the chimps outsmarted humans. The assumption that the brain of a human can outperform that of close relatives is overturned today by a study that adds to research that brings chimpanzees closer to humans.

Young chimpanzees have an "extraordinary" ability to remember numerals that is superior to that of human adults. "There are still many people, including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions," said Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University.

Prof Matsuzawa, a pioneer in studying the mental abilities of chimps, said even he was surprised by the results of his study. He and colleague Sana Inoue report the findings in the journal Current Biology. "No one can imagine that chimpanzees-young chimpanzees at the age of five-have a better performance in a memory task than humans.

The chimps' memory ability is reminiscent of what scientists call "eidetic imagery", a special ability to retain a detailed and accurate image of a complex scene or pattern. Such a "photographic memory" is known to be present in some normal human children, and then the ability declines with the age, he added.

Prof Andrew Whiten of the University of St Andrews commented: "I have seen Prof Matsuzawa's chimpanzees performing this task and one's first response is 'that's impossible!' because they remember a sequence of numerals so well and 'list' them so fast. I have also attempted the task myself and my limited recall only underlines how extraordinary is the apes' achievement."

In the new work, the researchers took three pairs of mother and infants and taught them Arabic numerals from 1 to 9. They were then pitted them against university students in a memory task. The chimps or humans were briefly presented with various numerals from 1 to 9 on a touch-screen monitor. Those numbers were then replaced with blank squares, and the test subject had to remember which numeral appeared in which location and touch the squares in the appropriate order.

Nine university students, three young chimpanzees and the chimps' mothers were tested. In the hardest tests, where numbers are flashed for 0.21 seconds on a screen, the star five-year-old chimp averaged 80 percent accuracy, double that of the university students. The young chimpanzees could grasp many numerals at a single glance, with no change in performance as the hold duration - the amount of time that the numbers remained on the screen - was varied. In general, the performance of the three young chimpanzees was better than that of their mothers and also all of the students.

One chimp, Ayumu, did the best. The researchers believe that the young chimps' newfound ability to top humans in the numerical memory task is "just a part of the very flexible intelligence of young chimpanzees".

Source : news.nationalgeographic.com

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