Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Chimps 1 - 0 Students

I saw this story last night but thought I'd save it for todays blog.

You may seen that in a series of memory tests devised by Japanese scientists young Chimps did better than university students.

The tasks involved remembering the location of numbers on a screen, and correctly recalling the sequence.

The scientists tested five young chimps and their Mother against the University Students and the young chimps outperformed their Mother and the Students.

Dr Matsuzawa told BBC News, "We are still underestimating the intellectual capability of chimpanzees, our evolutionary neighbours." Or perhaps, sorry Anna ;), overstimating students.

You can read more and see a video on the BBC website

3 comments:

Jan said...

Frankly it doesn't surprise me, judging by the standard of literacy and other things I see today on some of the forums from young people. Makes it all the sadder too when you think of how chimps are so abused by man in a lot of cases. Just because creatures can't communicate with us using our language, we don't give them enough respect.

oldcrow61 said...

Gives one pause for thought, doesn't it.

Diddums said...

Have you ever tried any of those memory games? There are some in with the Hoyle game CDs... if I remember right! Er...

You truly need a photographic memory (a keen one) to remember where the squares are that you need. You can try learning a string of them in order, but that goes out of whack the further you get into the game. I doubt if the chimps sat there going "let's see, 27, 8, 3, 42... got to remember this for later!" But maybe that's underestimating them again.

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