Were not the only "intelligent" creatures around. Actually, in some ways we may not even be the most intelligent creatures around. Researchers from the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University have shown that chimpanzees can have an exceptional memory (Inoue, S. and Matsuzawa, T. 2007, Working memory of numerals in chimpanzees, Current Biology, 17(23): R1004-R1005). The test used to make this claim is called a "limited hold memory task". In this test Arabic numerals, 1 to 9, will appear on the screen in a grid of 8X5. After a very short period of time white blocks cover the numerals just displayed so they are no longer visible. The object is to click on the blocks in order from lowest to highest. The numerals do not have to be consecutively sequential (ex 1,2,3,4 or they could be 1, 5, 7, 9). The coolest part about this research is that when they put chimpanzees in head to head competition with college students, there was no competition. Chimpanzees seem to be much better at this task. Here is a video of Ayumu completing the task.
Could this be some sort of super chimpanzee that was gifted with this particular skill at birth? Probably not, as there were two other chimpanzees in the study that were doing just as well. Could the chimp be more interested or motivated than the people? The chimp was getting a peanut for a successful task while people may not put the same value on a single peanut. I don't think this is the case, as being a college student I personally wouldn't want to be beaten by a monkey at a cognitive task. Maybe, that's just me though. Here is a cool way to test your own ability versus ayumu. I wasn't anywhere near chimp skill and I was trying very hard.
One difference that could explain the findings is that chimpanzees may be able to visually traverse an image faster than humans. At the fastest stimuli presentation there is not enough time for the average human to move their eyes to each number. The chimp may just have more visual information to work with than humans, rather than having a more powerful working memory. However, more research on chimp visual processing would have to be done in order to make any real claims on this theory.
The best critic about this research is that the paper doesn't do a very good job on explaining how much training the humans had before the comparison was made. Ayumu was trained on this task since the age of 4, with 50 trials a session, 4 sessions a day, 5 to 6 days a week. It would have been nice to have seen how much practice the human participants had been given. I don't see it reasonable to go through the same exact process as the chimpanzee but it may make a difference if they had never played the game before or if they had 1000 trials of practice before hand.
The researcher's paper concludes with that child monkeys may have a more powerful eidetic memory than adult humans. In other words chimpanzees can remember more details about a visual scene than humans. They also mention that eidetic memory has been shown to decline with age, which may be another reason for the chimp's victory. Either way it's pretty awesome to see a chimp complete such a difficult task. I wonder how many other animals could have intelligences like this. If only there was a way to run dolphins through the same task.
Here is a 10 minute video by the researchers on ayumu and the study.
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