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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