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link to sorendreier.com]
...In a landmark test of short-term memory conducted in public in 2007, Ayumu demonstrated astonishing powers of recall, easily beating her human competitors, who had been in training for months.
The strength of Ayumu’s cognitive functions surprised even Matsuzawa, who has studied the mental dexterity of chimps for 36 years. ...“We’ve concluded through the cognitive tests that chimps have extraordinary memories,” Matsuzawa says. “They can grasp things at a glance. As a human, you can do things to improve your memory, but you will never be a match for Ayumu.”
The results stunned observers. In the tests, Ai and Ayumu, and two other pairs of a mother and offspring, were shown the numerals 1 to 9 spread randomly across a computer screen.
Their task was to touch the numbers in ascending order. To complicate matters, the game was altered so that as soon as the chimps touched the digit 1, the remaining eight were immediately masked by white squares. To complete the exercise, they had to remember the location of each concealed number and, again, touch them in the correct order.
In an even harder version, five numbers appeared on the screen before turning into white squares. The animals and their human counterparts displayed the same degree of accuracy – about 80% – when the numbers remained visible for seven tenths of a second. But when the time was reduced to four tenths of a second, and then just two tenths, Ayumu maintained the same level of accuracy, while his mother and the human volunteers floundered.,,,
...For the chimps, the ability to memorise the location of objects is critical to their survival in the wild, where they compete for food with other, often aggressive, ape communities. To thrive, an individual chimp must be able to look up at, say, a sprawling fig tree and quickly note the location of the ripe fruit.
“They have to be able to think quickly because there are other hungry chimps behind them,” Matsuzawa says.
Japan
