|
Young World
Well done, Chimps
Photo: S.R. Raghunathan
Chimps: Extraordinary photographic memory.
Chimpanzees seem to have an extraordinary photographic memory that is far superior to ours. 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 assume
d 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.” Dr. Matsuzawa and colleagues tested three pairs of mother and baby chimpanzees against university students in a memory task involving numbers.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Young World
|
