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If "You vs. The Chimp - Video Show Chimp Incredible Photographic Memory Human Can't Even Compare" is not shown property. Visit the source link above.
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You vs.
The Chimp |
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Video showing chimps' remarkable memory
skills. |
Chimpanzees have an extraordinary photographic memory that
is far superior to ours, research suggests.
Young chimps outperformed university students in memory tests
devised by Japanese scientists.
The tasks involved remembering the location of numbers on a screen,
and correctly recalling the sequence.
The findings, published in Current Biology, suggest we may have
under-estimated the intelligence of our closest living
relatives.
Until now, it had always been assumed that chimps could not match
humans in memory and other mental skills.
"There are still many people, including many biologists, who
believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive
functions," said lead researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto
University.
"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."
Memory tests
Dr Matsuzawa and colleagues tested three pairs of mother and baby
chimpanzees against university students in a memory task involving
numbers.
 The
mothers and their five-year-old offspring had already been taught
to "count" from one to nine.
During the experiment, each subject was presented with various
numerals from one to nine on a touch screen monitor.
The numbers were then replaced with blank squares and the test
subject had to remember which number appeared in which location,
then touch the appropriate square.
They found that, in general, the young chimps performed better than
their mothers and the adult humans.
The university students were slower than all of the three young
chimpanzees in their response.
The researchers then varied the amount of time that the numbers
appeared on-screen to compare the working memory of humans and
chimps.
Chimps performed much better than university students in speed and
accuracy when the numbers appeared only briefly on screen.
The shortest time duration, 210 milliseconds, did not leave enough
time for the subjects to explore the screen by eye movement -
something we do all the time when we read.
This is evidence, the researchers believe, that young chimps have a
photographic memory which allows them to memorise a complex scene
or pattern at a glance. This is sometimes present in human children
but declines with age, they say.
"Young chimpanzees have a better memory than human adults," Dr
Matsuzawa told BBC News.
"We are still underestimating the intellectual capability of
chimpanzees, our evolutionary
neighbours."
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