If you ever get challenged by a chimpanzee to play a round of Brain Age, you might want to think twice before you take up the task. It turns out that chimps are pretty good at short-term memory-even better than humans in some cases.
Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a primatologist at Kyoto University, Japan conducted a study in which trained chimps were given tests in memorizing the placement of various numbers on a screen. The figures only were displayed for two tenths of a second. When students were matched up against the chimps, the furry simians scored an 80% accuracy rate over the humans, which clocked in at only 40%.
What does this all mean? Matsuzawa said, "We trained university students for six months and their accuracy did not reach this level [of the chimps]" It doesn’t mean that chimps are necessarily smarter than humans, although some may dispute this fact while observing daily human activity, but it does mean that chimpanzees have the capacity to memorize patterns more precisely than humans.
Michael Beran, a psychologist from Georgia State University noted the similarities between the two species but also noted, "I work with some pretty smart chimps, but they’re not going to do your calculus homework."
[via nature]
