Forget 5th Graders… Are You Smarter Than A Chimp?

College students apparently aren’t: In a test of working and visual memory, the 5 year old chimp Ayumu and his friends came out on top. Find out how you stack up with a version of the test , available by courtesy of the good folks at Lumosity.

Ok, so yes, we’re muddying the definition of “smart” again… the study really tested a very limited skill set. Overly simplified, a series of numbers appeared on a computer touch screen, then were hidden with white squares. The chimp or human was required to select the squares in order of the numbers they replaced. (And yes, both the chimps and college students had learned to count to 9.)

The results varied depending on the details of the test, but over all, the chimps did better.Sometimes they were faster, sometimes they were more accurate. Ayumu (immortalized here on YouTube) did the best, with an 80% success rate in at least one set of tests. Even with 6 months of training, the students still couldn’t out perform their young primate cousins.

The difference was clearest when the numbers were shown very briefly, appearing for less than 2/10ths of a second. That’s too fast for our eyes to scan the pattern, much less attempt to consciously remember it, so the chimps probably have a better eidetic memory than we do — meaning they have photographic recall.

The researchers suggested two possible reasons for this: humans may have given up some memory and processing skills in order to develop those areas of the brain for other uses, like speech. The difference might also have to do with age; the chimps tested were young, and the task requires a skill children have, but which fades with age. (Apparently, in a later test, Ayumu’s mother, Ai did worse than the college students, so they can take some comfort in that.)

On a personal note, the mention of children losing a sort of photographic memory with age interested me - I had something akin to it up until high school, when it started to fail. I chalked the loss up to some health issues, but maybe it was just normal maturing.

For those of you into such things, here’s a link to the actual study (or at least an abstract of it): Working memory of numerals in chimpanzees

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MINDTWEAK: I still have a photographic memory, you know. It’s just that I forget to take the lens cap off.

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