Whiz Chimps Outsmart College Students

Dec. 3, 2007 -- Three five-year-old chimpanzees have soundly defeated nine university students while playing a computer game that tests numerical memory skills, according to a paper published today in Current Biology.

The scores weren't even close. One young chimp named Ayumu who, in his off time, buys his own vending machine snacks, scored 76 percent correct in one game. The adult human average for the same game was 36 percent correct.

The study is one of the first to demonstrate that, at least under certain circumstances, chimp memory may be superior to that of humans.

"No human adults reached Ayumu's level," co-author Tetsuro Matsuzawa told Discovery News.

"The young chimpanzees are better than human adults in a memory task," agreed Matsuzawa, who collaborated with Sana Inoue on the paper and is the director of Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute. "Young chimpanzees quickly grasp many numerals at a glance, with no decline in performance as the hold duration is varied."

Matsuzawa was referring to the game, which functioned like the popular card match memory games on many home computers.

In this case, however, the three young chimp players (and their mothers), along with the human students, were each shown a series of numbers from 1 to 9 on the screen. The numbers were then replaced by blank squares, which the players had to touch based on their knowledge of numerical sequences. For example, if the numbers 2,3,5,8 and 9 appeared on the screen, the player had to touch the corresponding blank squares in that order.

What confused the human players was the length of time that the numbers first appeared on the screen. The shorter the duration, the worse they scored.

"Ayumu's performance was kept constant regardless of the duration of looking at the numerals," said Matsuzawa, who even failed to stump the chimp when he flashed five numbers for just 210 milliseconds.