Monkeys Outperform College Students, Again

Dec. 18, 2007 -- A college education doesn't give you much of an edge over a monkey when it comes to doing some basic arithmetic, according to a study released Monday that underscores the surprising mental agility of our simian relatives.

In a rapid fire test of mental addition, monkeys performed almost as well as college students, showing they're no slouches when it comes to number crunching.

The macaques got their sums right 76 percent of the time, while the students got the correct answer 94 percent of the time in a series of increasingly challenging maths tests.

"We know that animals can recognize quantities, but there is less evidence for their ability to carry out explicit mathematical tasks, such as addition," said Jessica Cantlon, a researcher at Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience in Durham, North Carolina.

"Our study shows that they can."

The study in the Public Library of Science Biology comes just a couple of weeks after Japanese researchers revealed that young chimps outperformed college students in tests of short-term memory.

The young chimps surprised the Japanese investigators by being able to retrace patterns of numbers flashed up on a computer screen faster than their human rivals.

The current study, according to researchers, goes one step further by showing that primates can process information as well as reproduce it, and that there's more to our closest living relatives than "monkey see, monkey do."

It also suggests that basic arithmetic may be part of our shared evolutionary past.