NEW YORK (AP) — Never mind that TV show that asks if you’re smarter than a fifth-grader. Is your memory better than a young chimp’s?
Maybe not.
Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in two tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won.
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One memory test included three 5-year-old chimps who’d been taught the order of Arabic numerals 1 through 9, and a dozen human volunteers.
They saw nine numbers displayed on a computer screen. When they touched the first number, the other eight turned into white squares. The test was to touch all these squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there.
Results showed that the chimps, while no more accurate than the people, could do this faster.
(snip)
He thinks two factors gave his chimps the edge. For one thing, he believes human ancestors gave up much of this skill over evolutionary time to make room in the brain for gaining language abilities.
The other factor is the youth of Ayumu and his peers. The memory for images that’s needed for the tests resembles a skill found in children, but which dissipates with age. In fact, the young chimps performed better than older chimps in the new study. (Ayumu’s mom did even worse than the college students).
These last two paragraphs explain why this is probably the most pointless academic study ever. So chimps have better short-term memory than young adult humans. What good will it do the world? And also, nobody would ever know of the chimp’s short term memory prowess if not for the scientific method and neuroscience — both disciplines not invented by chimps.
