5-year-old chimp beats college kids in computer game
Posted by: Chris Williamson in Singularity News
NEW YORK (AP) — Think you’re smarter than a fifth-grader? How about a 5-year-old chimp? Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won.
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. Take the quiz and see how you’d do »
One memory test included three 5-year-old chimps who’d been taught the order of Arabic numerals 1 through 9, and a dozen human volunteers. Watch as the chimps out-perform the humans »
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. more>>>
Subscribe to the Blogging the Singularity RSS feed!
Stumble it!
Entries (RSS)