Young Chimp Beats College Students In Memory Test

If you are thinking you are smarter than a chimp, then you could be wrong because young chimps are smarter than many college students in memory test.

The young chimps and college students were requested to recall the location of numerals that have changed to squares in a memory test on a touch screen monitor at the Primate Research Institute in Kyoto, Japan.

Three 5-year-old chimps were taught the order of Arabic numerals 1 to 9 before the test.

In the test, they saw nine numbers displayed on a touch screen monitor. When they touched number 1, the other eight numbers turned into white squares. They are requested to touch all these squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there.

Results showed that the chimps could do faster. The young chimp won in overall in the challenge against college students in two tests of short-term memory.

Many people including many scientists believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions.

“No one can imagine that young chimpanzees at the age of 5 have a better performance in a memory task than humans,” the researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University said.