Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 3 December 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2007.317
News
Chimp beats students at computer game
Young chimpanzee can recall number placement better than people can.
A particularly cunning seven-year-old chimp named Ayumu has bested university students at a game of memory. He and two other young chimps recalled the placement of numbers flashed onto a computer screen faster and more accurately than humans.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email webadmin@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
I say that it's much simpler than evolution, it's a matter of training. In a small way the experiment is not well balanced. The chimps were trained at a young age, when their brains are still plastic. If the same study is done with college students trained for the same length of time as the chimps the results would be closer than 1:2. Title should be "Young well trained Chimps beat untrained college students", less impressive, but more accurate.
Now I have found my next goal in life - to beat a chimpanzee LOL!
I believe there is more processing in chimps at V1 level. May be at retina level as well. In the case of humans, visual data has to go deep into brain for processing. During this deep penetration of data into he brain, motor task of touching the screen interferes with the visual processing. On the other hand if visual processing can be done at a lower level, then mixing of motor tasks and visual processing can be avoided.
I tend to agree with Clear. Although he should also be honest and just say that he doesn't know whether it would be closer than 1:2. What I think is remarkable is the fact that these animals, considered among the most intelligent, can be "trained" (like Pavlov's dogs) into something that boring and unchallenging. It would be interesting to know if humans could cope with seven years of doing the same game over and over again and hence answer the question if humans have a 'drive' in life that cannot be bribed with treats... But what committee will allow such an experiment ;-)
Maybe the chimps don't know the meaning of 1,2,3 and so on. But not students.
Given there are known effects of age on memory function, would it not be more approprate to match age classes when comparing performances, and hence eliminate the age variable as a determining factor?
I Like chimps and gravey
Humans are taught to understand and analyze numbers, not just remember a screen. Is it possible that humans with less education would fare better? How about differences between people with different math aptitude?
I question whether this is a fair comparison. Remarkable as their ability is, the animals have been trained extensively and for a long time to do this particular task. A fair comparison would be to human subjects practiced in this 'game' to a comparable degree. After all, the authors do conclude that this ability might have been lost in human due to lack of use... So here one is comparing a 'trained' and 'untrained' subjects. And a minor point, what useful question has this research answered?
Hope this does not sound too naive, but much research is done pursuing questions raised by previous research. Seldom does one read a research paper that ends without pointing out areas further research may be appropriate.
I think it is premature to look at this outcome as a signal that chimps and people evolved differently and that these differences in capability are now innate. The fact that college students were used as a representative human population could bias the outcome (see Paul Kandel's comment above). Is it possible that our school training to process numbers or other types of information sequentially (for example, learning to read!) actually inhibits the parallel processing required for the quick recognition and memory task? In his comment, Clear Menser asks whether additional training for humans at the specific task might improve outcome. I am asking whether deeply ingrained training we have already received to process this type of information sequentially might actually slow us down at this particular task.
I think that the very last part of "Planet of The Apes" might come true one day...LOL
I watched the video and tried to play it. I found that this game is not as hard as it supposed to be according to the context of the paper. I think an average score of 40% for students might not be true. I have never played a game like that before. However, I believe I can scores more than 40%. (Assuming one scores if and only if he/she picks the 5 number in order without any mistake) I believe with a little bit training, any human can make a score close to 100%.
Adequate sleep is needed for learning. Do we know the sleep history of the chimps during learning compared to the students? Most college students get 6-7 hours of sleep when 9 hours would be optimal. Maybe sleep is an unmeasured variable in this study?
AS anyone who has ever played Memory with with a five-year old can testtify, little children tend to be far better at this game than adults. As I have seen the "intelligence" of chimps (whatever that means) compared to that of a human toddler, maybe the result isn't that surprising after all.
I believe that the fact that other creatures-whether classified in our species or not-can do things behind the capabilities of homosapians, is not surprising. Birds can fly and sheetah can run at 112km/h. From such experiment, it could be simply concluded that these shimps have a higher developed, more active, instant memory centre, I believe it is the amygdala as we-humans- previously simply concluded that with feathures, we cannot fly. Such finding makes no offence to the students that shared the test nor to man in general. About the author's comment that we have evolved language instead of instant memory,I find it missleading to put evolution into hypothesis because it is still a theory in question. In fact, such findings denies evolution, and on the contrary, would conclude that the instant memory of shimps is an evolution of the one of humans. We-homosapians- cannot fly and we have less instant memory,but we developed aeroplanes and computers by which we are rising civilizations.
What chimps cannot do is sing, dance, create representational images, and engage in sophisticated pretend play and role-play comparable with humans. The conclusions of this study and much of the comment on this site reflect the "cognoparadigm" - the belief that "intelligence" is the reason for our large brains and what most distinguishes us from other animals; that brains work like computers; and that brains are primarily for thinking with. Computers were invented to do the things that brains cannot do well - monotonous reiterative calculation - whereas computers struggle with tasks that brains do easily. Brains are clearly doing organs before they are thinking organs. Brains could not evolve in animals without muscles, and foetal brains put out effector fibres to muscles before they develop affector fibres to receive information from sensory organs. Fossil and archaeological evidence - and (admittedly limited so far) imaging research on role-play, pretend play, and dance - are consistent with a "play and display" hypothesis of brain expansion. That is, human brains probably got bigger because of selection pressure for our formidable armamentarium of social displays which are presumably prerequisites for our unique levels of self- and other-consciousness. Embodied actions appear to be necessary for many of our "cognitive" abilities - "The mind will follow the hand" as Montessori observed. The lack of neuroscientific research on the things that make us human reflects political biases such as western individualism and the valuation of "work" over "play". Our ideas of "intelligence" themselves reflect the ideosyncratic needs of industrialised nation states. There have been three main "isms" in psychology. Intellectualism survived 50 years - from around 1860 to 1910 - and behaviourism another 50 - from 1910 to 1960. If cognitivism follows these precedents, it will be obsolete by 2010!!
I think that the results are very interesting and the experiments should be repeated to a wider range of human subjects, e.g. autistic and dyslexic children, people of different professions, especially those who need to use visual cues for their daily jobs.
I think that the results are very interesting and the experiments should be repeated with a wider range of human subjects, e.g. autistic and dyslexic children, people of different professions, especially those who need to use visual cues for their daily jobs.
I think that the results are very interesting and the experiments should be repeated with a wider range of human subjects, e.g. autistic and dyslexic children, people of different professions, especially those who need to use visual cues for their daily jobs.
I want to add to Martijn's comment. It's interesting that the young chimps all performed better than their mothers at the game. Matsuzawa compared this to a phenomonen called eidetic imagery -- basically a photographic memory. Human children are more likely to have it than adults, and their abilities diminish with age. I think the German psychologist Erich Rudolph Jaenesch was one of the first to document it. Thanks for reading.
Why is it so hard for men to think that they may not be the best species of the universe, all the time? If men were so great, why is the majority of humans on earth hungry, suffering and/or unhappy?
Here's a cool site where you can play the game and see if you can beat the chimp: http://games.lumosity.com/chimp.html
It's official. In addition to undegrads, Ayumu has beaten a Nature reporter. One of my colleagues, however, put the chimp in his place scoring 10/10 (after much practice). How did you do?