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Chimps Outscore College Students on Memory Test

Journal written by arbitraryaardvark (845916) and posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Dec 03, 2007 02:11 PM
from the well-when-the-rewards-are-bananas dept.
It's funny. Laugh. User Journal Science
AP's Malcolm Ritter reports that young chimpanzees were better at remembering a series of numbers flashed on a screen, than the Japanese college students used as a control group. Scientists plan to repeat the experiment using 5th graders against the great apes.
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Firehose:Nimble chimps outscore college students on memory test by arbitraryaardvark (845916)
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Chimps Outscore College Students on Memory Test 25 Comments More /

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  • BAC! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2007, @02:11PM (#21562073)
    I demand blood alcohol content tests!

    At least make the chimps do banana flavored shots the night before ...

      • Re:BAC! (Score:5, Funny)

        by Squiffy (242681) on Monday December 03 2007, @03:28PM (#21563047) Homepage
        Considering some of the undergrads I've known, I'm surprised they were able to get them all to sit still long enough to administer the test. It must have been like herding cats.

  • Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Harmonious Botch (921977) * on Monday December 03 2007, @02:13PM (#21562089) Homepage Journal
    I, for one, welcome our new... umm... er, ah what were they again?

  • Misleading... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pwnies (1034518) * <jjcm.linux+slashdot@gmail.com> on Monday December 03 2007, @02:13PM (#21562095) Homepage Journal
    FTA:

    Results showed that the chimps, while no more accurate than the people, could do this faster.
    Seems to me that the headline is slightly misleading. It's not that the chimps could do better on the memory tests, they could just do it faster - at least for the 8/10ths of a second test. Later the article shows that the chimps could perform the same when the screen flashed for only 2/10ths of a second. This doesn't necessarily mean that they have a better memory, as this could be attributed to peripheral vision as well.

    • Re:Misleading... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mistlefoot (636417) on Monday December 03 2007, @02:24PM (#21562249)
      Why is this post modded (at time of my reply) off-topic. This is exactly what the article says.

      The Chimps are better at "reacting" then people are. That they do as well as humans when the numbers are flashed on the screen for a longer duration is more of a surprise. The more time that is allowed for memorizing, the better humans should do. This doesn't seem to be the case though. Nothing in the article says whether any tests where done, with say, 5 seconds of showing the numbers on the screen - which would really allow for actual thought and not just 'reaction'....

    • Re:Misleading... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Smidge204 (605297) on Monday December 03 2007, @02:48PM (#21562571)
      FTA:

      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.


      I requoted that part because the test they are talking about is important.

      If you can see these numbers on the screen for any length of time you want, then "reaction" becomes irrelevant. I interpret this portion of the article to say the chimps could perform at the same accuracy as the humans while taking less time to memorize and recall the numbers' locations. That certainly sounds like "better" short-term memory to me... increased speed without loss of accuracy.

      The SECOND test also involved remembering the location of five numbers on the screen and recalling these locations in the correct order, except the subjects had less than a second to study them. This test indicates that the chimp was again able to memorize the pattern faster and with more accuracy than humans.
      =Smidge=

      • Re:Misleading... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Jesus_666 (702802) on Monday December 03 2007, @03:29PM (#21563069)

        That certainly sounds like "better" short-term memory to me... increased speed without loss of accuracy.
        Whether or not that is better depends on oter parameters, as well. SRAM is much faster than DRAM, yet modern high performance desktops rely on DRAM - because SRAM has a lower density than DRAM. Likewise, the chimpanzee brain could allocate more resources to short-term memory, on the expense of other functions our brains tend to emphasize. The result would be faster short-term memory that still wouldn't neccessarily be desirable for us.

    • Brain speed != intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)

      by EmbeddedJanitor (597831) on Monday December 03 2007, @03:20PM (#21562969)
      The speed at which you see and respond is not at all linked to intelligence. It is far more linked to your need for this speed (ie. due to evolution), priimarily driven by your need to control motion and for feeding.

      For example animals which feed by catching fast moving bugs in their mouth (eg. birds and fish) need to respond very quickly otherwise their food is long gone. Animals that eat berries and kill their food or have paws and hands don't have to be that fast. Animals that live in trees etc and need to judge distance better (monkeys etc) need faster responses than ground based humans etc.

      I forget what this effect is called, but I understand that trout have a speed 20x that of humans. That's to be expected when a trout has to feed by eating little bugs coming past it in fast moving water. The trout has to be able to respond quickly to make an energy efficient movement and get the bug before it has gone. The energy in a small gnat is not enough to waste on charging around the stream.

      As a result of this, I'm not at all suprised that a chimp beats a human in a low level counting game.

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by eviloverlordx (99809) on Monday December 03 2007, @02:20PM (#21562179)
    A large group of chimpanzees has produced the collected works of Shakespeare four times faster than the same number of college students, and with fewer spelling errors.

  • Actually, it kind of makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)

    by $RANDOMLUSER (804576) on Monday December 03 2007, @02:20PM (#21562183)
    That a chimp would do it faster. A human would instinctively put a "name" on each number seen, thus slowing down the "processing".

  • Yes, but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by lazlo (15906) on Monday December 03 2007, @02:22PM (#21562207) Homepage
    The chimps scored better than the college students on memory tests, but their term papers were only marginally better.

  • Not a comparison of cognitive ability (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SparkleMotion88 (1013083) on Monday December 03 2007, @02:24PM (#21562251)

    One memory test included three 5-year-old chimps who'd been taught the order of Arabic numerals 1 through 9, ...

    Results showed that the chimps, while no more accurate than the people, could do this faster.
    Seems to me that these chimps were trained to perform this task. They've probably even used the test setup before whereas the humans were probably using it for the first time. I guess I'm not surprised that the chimps were faster than the humans. Also:

    But when the numbers were displayed for just four-tenths or two-tenths of a second, the chimp was the champ. The briefer of those times is too short to allow a look around the screen, and in those tests Ayumu still scored about 80 percent, while humans plunged to 40 percent.
    That says to me that a chimp is able to move its eyes around faster than a human is. This is also something I would expect. So perhaps this result says more about relative visual ability than relative cognitive ability?

  • Boringly predictable research. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wolfen (12255) on Monday December 03 2007, @02:27PM (#21562283) Homepage
    The best part about this news story is when you reach the
    end of the article and the researchers reveal that
    their results are basically meaningless because you
      can get the same results by testing children versus adults.

    The real question is how to human children compare with the young chimpanzees.

  • The real question is. (Score:5, Funny)

    by CrazyJim1 (809850) on Monday December 03 2007, @02:29PM (#21562319) Journal
    Did the monkeys have a hat on?

  • Well no shit... (Score:5, Funny)

    by R2.0 (532027) on Monday December 03 2007, @02:32PM (#21562349)
    I am positive that, after 6 years (2 degrees) of drinking and sleep deprivation, I am significantly dumber than I was going in to school.

  • 5th Graders (Score:5, Funny)

    by mqduck (232646) <mqduck@sonic.COBOLnet minus language> on Monday December 03 2007, @02:40PM (#21562447)

    Scientists plan to repeat the experiment using 5th graders against the great apes.
    I'm having difficulty understanding the reasoning of going from college students to 5th graders. I suppose I could RTFM, but instead I'm going to criticize from the safety of Slashdot.

  • Flawed experimental design (Score:5, Funny)

    by Billosaur (927319) * <wgrother&optonline,net> on Monday December 03 2007, @02:44PM (#21562523) Journal

    To be accurate, they should have used chimpanzees who were attending college.

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