In a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a primatologist at Kyoto University, claimed chimps have a better (meaning faster) working memory than we do.
The primates can, in less than 1/2 a second, remember the position and sequence of up to nine numbers on a computer screen, a task that takes humans several seconds.
Professor Matsuzawa suggested that chimps have developed this part of their memory because they live in the “here and now” whereas humans are thinking more about the past and planning for the future.
In the wild they also have to make very quick spatial decisions such as the exact positions in a tree of ripe fruit and the precise location of potential enemies in a rival troupe of chimps, he told The Independent.
Videos of Ayumu and Ai show just how good they are at the task, better than any humans that have tried the same test apart from certain individuals who suffer from Asperger’s syndrome.
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