GENIUS CHIMPS!

Managed to catch a program on TV when I was at a friends house and it facinated me soo much I just have to write about it. The program was about a Japanese scientist that is studying chimps and their memory. He had trained all of these chimps to use touch screen computers and got them to play memory games, much like the ones on Brain Training, rewarding them with fruit whenever they did something right.

The chimps were trained to press numbers on the screen in order that were placed randomly. This is what facinated me, the chimps could remember characters and japanese symbols for colours and perform these tasks at amazing speeds! Not only that but the young chimps would watch their parents playing these games and would learn the symbols by example.

The reason behind these tests was to test the chimp's working memory. Working memory is what we use to remember everyday things such as our PIN numbers and where a shop is on the high street. The research started to suggest that chimps actually had a better working memory than us and that they may even be more intelligent than us in some ways.

To test this, the scientists performed an identical test on both humans and chimps. They created a test in which numbers were shown to the subject and they were randomly placed in front of them. The numbers were then hidden and the subject had to show where they were in order. Incredibly, only one out of fifteen humans could complete this test, where as, a large percentage of the chimps could complete it very quickly and easily.

They then went on to show a memory expert, who could remember an entire pack of cards, fail to beat the chimps at a memory game. The numbers were shown for a quarter of a second and the chimps could remember where they were every time.

I think it is facinating how much about the world we are finding out and the possibilities we had never considered. These chimps proved to me that maybe we shouldn't assume too much about what is going on in the world.