Flashermac Posted December 4, 2007 Report Share Posted December 4, 2007 NEW YORK (AP) - Think you're smarter than a fifth-grader? How about a 5-year-old chimp? Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won. That challenges the belief of many people, including many scientists, that "humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions," said researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University. "No one can imagine that chimpanzees - young chimpanzees at the age of 5 - have a better performance in a memory task than humans," he said in a statement. Matsuzawa, a pioneer in studying the mental abilities of chimps, said even he was surprised. He and colleague Sana Inoue report the results in Tuesday's issue of the journal Current Biology. 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. Somehow this doesn't surprise me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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