I am dumber than a chimp," says one more.Įven scientists got upset. "That's a million times better than I can ever do." "It's decadent and it's wrong," writes someone else. "This is not helping anyone," writes another. "How does he do that?" writes one YouTube reader. Still, his performance leaves lots of people feeling uncomfortable. But for a species that grows up in dense forests, where food is hiding in plain sight, a photographic memory might be very useful.ĭon't Tell Me I'm More Stupid Than A Chimp Is he exceptional? Will he stay this sharp when he's older? We won't know till we've tested many other chimps. And her child, the apprentice, learns by careful observation," the professor says. "The mother does not offer any explanation. When Professor Matsuzawa gave him a little computer with a small touch screen, he explored it, but cautiously. Her son didn't interfere, didn't touch the keys. She is also a laboratory chimpanzee and has a computer of her own. It is their way of seeing the world."Īyumu learned his computer skills sitting on his mother's lap, watching. It is something special for the chimpanzee mind. "You and I," says Matsuzawa, "we cannot do this. He takes a picture with his mind and holds it." Even if he turns away from the screen to do something else, the information stays in Ayumu's head. This tells Japanese scholar Tetsuro Matsuzawa "that he has an actual picture memory, an eidetic memory. His success rate was close to 80 percent." We are their evolutionary neighbours.How'd he do it? Well, says science writer Virginia Morell in her new book Animal Wise, "it's impossible to track each number's position with one's eyes you had to take in the entire pattern with a single glance." And yet, "Ayumu nearly always got the sequence right. “We underestimate chimpanzee intelligence,” he says. Matsuzawa emphasises that the chimps in the study are by no means special – all chimps can perform like this, he says. In the wild, this memory skill might be useful for memorising fruit locations at a glance, or making a quick map of all the branches and routes in a tree, he says. He says that chimp intelligence is chronically underestimated, and one reason is that experiments stack the deck against the chimps. The results are “absolutely incredible” says Frans de Waal, at the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, US. “Rather than taking such findings as a rare example or a fluke, we should incorporate this knowledge into a mindset that acknowledges that chimpanzees – and probably other species – share aspects of what we think of as uniquely human intelligence.” ![]() “Observing that other species can outperform us on tasks that we assume we excel at is a bit humbling,” she says. The finding challenges human assumptions about our uniqueness, and should make us think harder about ourselves in relation to other animals, says anthropologist Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University, Ames, US. “We had to lose some function to get a new function.” ‘Humbling’ discovery “In the course of evolution we humans lost it, but acquired a new skill of symbolisation – in other words, language,” he says. ![]() He suggests that early humans lost the skill as we acquired other memory-related skills such as representation and hierarchical organisation. (See a video library of chimp cognition.) In rare cases, human children have a kind of photographic memory like that shown by the young chimps, but it disappears with age, says Tetsuro Matsuzawa, at the primate research institute at Kyoto University, Japan, who led the study. This suggests that they use a kind of eidetic or photographic memory. The youngsters easily remembered the locations, even at the shortest duration, which does not leave enough time for the eye to move and scan the screen. While the adult chimps were able to remember the location of the numbers in the correct order with the same or worse ability as the humans, the three adolescent chimps outperformed the humans. Using an ability akin to photographic memory, the young chimps were able to memorise the location of the numerals with better accuracy than humans performing the same task.ĭuring the test, the numerals appeared on the screen for 650, 430 or 210 milliseconds, and were then replaced by blank white squares. The chimps had previously been taught the ascending order of the numbers.
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