Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: another_someone on 03/12/2007 22:05:58
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7124156.stm
Chimpanzees have an extraordinary photographic memory that is far superior to ours, research suggests.
Young chimps outperformed university students in memory tests devised by Japanese scientists.
The tasks involved remembering the location of numbers on a screen, and correctly recalling the sequence.
The findings, published in Current Biology, suggest we may have under-estimated the intelligence of our closest living relatives.
Until now, it had always been assumed that chimps could not match humans in memory and other mental skills.
"There are still many people, including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions," said lead researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University.
"No one can imagine that chimpanzees - young chimpanzees at the age of five - have a better performance in a memory task than humans.
"Here we show for the first time that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection - better than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus, following the same procedure."
Memory tests
Dr Matsuzawa and colleagues tested three pairs of mother and baby chimpanzees against university students in a memory task involving numbers.
The mothers and their five-year-old offspring had already been taught to "count" from one to nine.
During the experiment, each subject was presented with various numerals from one to nine on a touch screen monitor.
The numbers were then replaced with blank squares and the test subject had to remember which number appeared in which location, then touch the appropriate square.
They found that, in general, the young chimps performed better than their mothers and the adult humans.
The university students were slower than all of the three young chimpanzees in their response.
The researchers then varied the amount of time that the numbers appeared on-screen to compare the working memory of humans and chimps.
Chimps performed much better than university students in speed and accuracy when the numbers appeared only briefly on screen.
The shortest time duration, 210 milliseconds, did not leave enough time for the subjects to explore the screen by eye movement - something we do all the time when we read.
This is evidence, the researchers believe, that young chimps have a photographic memory which allows them to memorise a complex scene or pattern at a glance. This is sometimes present in human children but declines with age, they say.
"Young chimpanzees have a better memory than human adults," Dr Matsuzawa told BBC News.
"We are still underestimating the intellectual capability of chimpanzees, our evolutionary neighbours."
'Ground-breaking'
Dr Lisa Parr, who works with chimps at the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University in Atlanta, US, described the research as "ground-breaking".
She said their importance of these primates for understanding the skills necessary for the evolution of modern humans was unparalleled.
"They are our closest living relatives and thus are in a unique position to inform us about our evolutionary heritage," said Dr Parr.
"These studies tell us that elaborate short-term memory skills may have had a much more salient function in early humans than is present in modern humans, perhaps due to our increasing reliance on language-based memory skills."
The research is published in Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press.
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Wow, Interesting!
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I would love to believe the argument that chimps can outdo us in the memory department. However, to draw that conclusion from this study, it would be more approprate to match age classes when comparing performances between chimps and humans (infant-infant and adult-adult, rather than infant chimp-adult human), given that we know memory function can show age dependence. Otherwise the age variable remains a possible determining factor in the differences observed.
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I would love to believe the argument that chimps can outdo us in the memory department. However, to draw that conclusion from this study, it would be more approprate to match age classes when comparing performances between chimps and humans (infant-infant and adult-adult, rather than infant chimp-adult human), given that we know memory function can show age dependence. Otherwise the age variable remains a possible determining factor in the differences observed.
Age itself is not something that is meaningful, but comparable points in their development might be - but it is not always easy to say where those comparable points are.
What I do note is that you use the term 'infant', whereas the original article merely refer to 'young' and no qualification as to what is meant by 'young'. To me, a typical college student is 'young'.
Clearly, in modern terms, someone in their late teens is on the cusp of adulthood, whereas in past centuries one may have been considered adult by the age of 13, so even in humans it is difficult to judge what should be regarded as the right way to correlate developmental stages in life with chronological age. I would suspect (but may be proven wrong) that the age at which they looked at the chimps was similarly on the cusp of adulthood.
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"Here we report that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection — better even than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus following the same procedure."
"Moreover, the young ones showed better performance than adults in the memory task."
Inoue S, Matsuzawa T (2007). Working memory of numerals in chimpanzees, Current Biology. 17: R1004-5.
I got the impression that they were referring to "young" and "adults" as discrete groups. The writers of the paper also do refer to the university student subjects as "adult", although they don't specify their ages. They could be, as you suggest, in their late teens, but alternatively, depending on their level of study and personal circumstances could be anything up from there.
I tend to consider adulthood as being marked by puberty and sexual maturity. University students would generally be above the age of puberty, whereas the chimps at 7 years of age would generally be slightly below the age of puberty. Sexual maturity may not correlate directly with the development of cognitive function, but given the major developmental changes that occur during puberty, may at least be a good starting point.
The word "young" is somewhat subjective. A 50 year old may consider a 40 year old young, while a 10 year old may see them as a touch ancient.