Chimps beat humans in memory test

By Helen Briggs
Science reporter, BBC News

Counting test Number memory test

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.
We are still underestimating the intellectual capability of chimpanzees, our
evolutionary neighbours (Dr Tetsuro Matsuzawa).
“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.
Human v Chimp

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.”

‘Ground-breaking’
 Dr Lisa Parr, who works with chimps at the Yerkes Primate Center at
Emory University in Atlanta, US, described the research as “ground-breaking”.
She said the importance of these primates for understanding the skills
necessary for the evolution of modern humans was unparalleled.
“They are our closest living relatives and thus are in a unique position to
inform us about our evolutionary heritage,” said Dr Parr.
“These studies tell us that elaborate short-term memory skills may have
had a much more salient function in early humans than is present in modern
humans, perhaps due to our increasing reliance on language-based memory
skills.”
The research is published in Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press.

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7124156.stm
Published: 2007/12/03 14:37:43 GMT
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