Last month Ayumu and five other chimpanzees made the news because of their outstanding cognitive performance. They even beat out college students in their tests. The results of the study was reported in Current Biology, “Working memory of numerals in chimpanzees.”
If you don’t believe me check out the video of Ayumu rocking the test:
Very impressive performance. Luminosity Games has remade Ayumu’s game. If you wanna try to see if you’re any better than Ayumu, give it a shot here. I’m not very good at the game.
14 Comments
January 29, 2008 at 12:09 pm
After reading this i found the memory game on http://games.lumosity.com/chimp.html i have been scoring from 7-9 consistantly. A documentary i just watched said that this has not been seen in humans?
Perhaps a trip to japan is in order? lol.
March 20, 2008 at 2:39 pm
yea, the game is very easy
But you are not some sort of genius if you can score great. I average a 10 game so why am I here?
April 3, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Most of the time I scored 2 or 3. I know why I’m here and not in Japan showing off.
June 6, 2008 at 7:24 am
[...] photoshopped screen grabs of Ayumu the chimp. If you wanna check it out for yourself, look at this video I shared of Ayumu’s cognitive abilities in January of this [...]
June 6, 2008 at 9:12 am
[...] Cyber Chimp spin machine. Furthermore, the photos of “Albert” are doctored images of Ayumu, a real chimp, who is studied to understand primate cognition. Here are two [...]
July 23, 2008 at 4:59 pm
It seems a lot of this has to do with repetitive training, not exclusively memory. When a human just looks at this test, at the speed it shows on lumosity, it is hard for most individuals, which is why the study showed human performance worsened as they were given less time to see the numbers (and the young chimp scores did not). But when Ayumu first trained for the game, he did not start at that level. First, he just touched the numbers in order on the screen (without the boxes covering them up), then eventually, he moved to doing it from memory, but he’d already trained in the speed of just touching numbers in order (memory or no). Then gradually, they decreased the amount of time they show the numbers, making it harder and harder. And I think he spent hours doing this, and of course, received food every time he did it right. Most humans don’t typically train like that, and the college students in the study were probably doing it for psych credit or something–and probably had not spent any time training for this (much less 5+ years of their lives training for this).
That said, it is certainly possible that chimps have a better ability to take a mental picture and process it at that speed than humans do. But it would be hard to tell with a test like that, since the chimps trained so much. Interesting and very impressive nonetheless.
August 4, 2008 at 3:00 am
The test is really evaluating our ability to quiet our inner voice long enough to focus on the numbers in order to remember their order. Chimps aren’t worrying about unpaid bills and such like humans are. For the same reason a typical 4 year old child could beat most adults in a similar memory game.
If an adult can shut their inner voice up long enough to do well in this game they have a neat parlor trick to show their friends. But, if the same adult normally doesn’t have an inner voice they don’t have a stable self-identity nor are they able to spot opportunities of interest to them nearly as well as would be someone focused on such opportunities.
November 6, 2008 at 9:42 pm
[...] to Primatology.net for the game [...]
February 6, 2009 at 9:45 am
I would challenge the chimp anytime , I average 7-9 pretty easy really
February 27, 2009 at 3:39 am
[...] is an unbelievable video of a chimpanzee Ayumu performing a memory task and the chimps have even beat college students on a [...]
March 1, 2009 at 2:56 pm
[...] the performance of a chimpanzee called Ayumu on this memory task. View [...]
August 7, 2009 at 8:54 am
Make sure you’re comparing apples to apples on this one. The game on the website only has 5 numbers shown… Ayumu’s game has 9. That’s a big difference in difficulty for such a game.
September 29, 2009 at 6:41 pm
He is a lefthander
October 21, 2009 at 2:43 pm
i played the game that the chimps doing at lumosity.com. its really amazing and takes a long time to beat him. ive gotten 10/10…beat that! =)