14 DAY TRIAL // Yeah, right, humans are the smartest beings of the planet, and all the other animals are dumb. Including our closest relatives. But, a new research, published in "Current Biology", showed that young chimpanzees have an astonishing higher short-term memory capacity than human adults.
"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." said Tetsuro Matsuzawa, of Kyoto University.
As with other cognitive functions, chimp memory has been considered weaker compared to the human one. Some observations have suggested that it may not be like that.
Now, 3 pairs of mothers and 5-year-old infant chimps (all having learned the ascending order of Arabic numerals from 1 to 9) were tested against university students, using a memory task involving numerals.
Chimps and humans were briefly showed various numerals (from 1 to 9) on a touch-screen monitor. After that, the numbers were covered with blank squares, and the subjects had to remember which numeral had been in each location, touching them in the right order.
The young chimps could remember a lot of numerals only at a glance (about 80 % of the numbers), and their performance was not affected by the hold duration (the time period that the numbers stayed on the screen), and they performed better than their mothers.
In all tests, adult humans were slower in comparison to the 3 young chimps, even if they remembered 80 % of the numbers correctly, and their performance (the number of correctly remembered numerals) dropped to 40 %, with a decrease in the hold duration from 0.7 seconds to 0.4 seconds.
"The chimps' memory ability is reminiscent of '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," said Matsuzawa.
"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." wrote the authors.
"Even with six months of training, three students failed to catch up to the three young chimps," Matsuzawa wrote to National Geographic.
The next logical test will be to test the little chimps against some real competition: children.