Chimps Beat College Students

Posted by Miss Cellania in Animal, Science & Tech on December 3, 2007 at 9:19 pm


150_ChimpanzeeIn a study at Tokyo University, 5-year-old chimpanzees displayed better short-term memory than college students!

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.

Researchers believe that relative youth helped the chimpanzees, so the next step is to match the chimps against young children. Link



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COMMENT

5 comments to "Chimps Beat College Students"

  1. Prof Dooby
    December 3rd, 2007 at 10:49 pm

    Apparently some scientists believe the study was flawed and the results can’t be trusted:
    http://pttbt.ca/2007/12/03/critics-cry-foul-over-chimp-memory-quiz.htm l

  2. just a guy
    December 3rd, 2007 at 11:40 pm

    first thing that popped into my mind was : are these chimps trained to respond to things to get food- as an initial way of establishing communicaiton (like with most animal training)?

    If so, the it makes sense. Plus, we know the chimps aren’t attending weekend frat mixers, smoking pot, and/or sleep depriving to study for tests or complete assignments. :D

  3. oliver
    December 4th, 2007 at 12:57 am

    Yeah, college students have no short term memory? There’s a shocker.

  4. donna
    December 4th, 2007 at 4:18 am

    But can the chimps play W.o.W?

  5. philip
    December 4th, 2007 at 8:22 pm

    How many of the students were right handed? I don’t know how much of a difference it would make but, the chimp looks to be left handed. If chimp brains work anything like human brains then he would probably be right brained and better suited than left brained people for a game like this. I wonder how he did against the few right brained people that were there? Again might not make a difference but I’m curious.


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