John mentioned this test, yesterday, on Tech5 – chimpanzees vs. humans at remembering sequential numbers.
I hadn’t even thought about checking YouTube for video excerpts from the experiment – till I saw this at the end of a newscast on CCTV9, this morning.
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Very cool!! I think I read about this a little while back. Of course, it doesn’t surprise me. When you compare two highly intelligent species, each is likely to have areas of expertise. We may be more general than most.
I’m still waiting to see if/when humans identify any parts of dolphin speech. And, if we do, whether it turns out to be more complex than our own. Will we be smart enough to be able to tell?
Chimps don’t smoke pot.
A banana is not a very good motivation for a guy. If the prize was one night with Jessica Alba, I’m sure he’d do much better.
I guess this would mean that the current resident of the White House is NOT a chimpanzee, contrary to popular belief!
I wonder if the chimps do better, because they’re less hindered by other mental junk.
The person taking the test might be focused, but they’re still thinking about the car payment coming up, what they’re gonna get their boyfriend for christmas, what they’re gonna wear to dinner that night, etc.
Just a thought.
Is that a mini game for the Brain Age DS game?
That settles it. I’m getting a new chimp memory module for my laptop.
Chimps don’t smoke pot and they don’t drink beer so go figure?
Wonder if they could be/have been taught to play video games (shooters, etc)?
“d00d, j00 just got pwnd by teh ch1mpz0rz, lol!!!1”
That guy looks an awful lot like my twin brother. Likes bananas too.
Well, perhaps this result should not be unexpected. If a chip has evolved to be proficient at living and hoping around in trees, then he had better be good at quickly recognizing visual symbols such as tree branches, landing zones, opportunistic food, and jump path obstructions. The modern survivors of the Chip have apparently retained this capability as indicated for instance by this test comparison with humans. Some say that our progenitors might have been chips. Most likely those chips were not so good at quickly recognizing visual symbols and fell to the ground more often while swinging through the trees. Many of these pore unfortunates were injured in the fall and had to stay on the ground. They were forced to learn to survive in this new slower environment and many generations later, our distant cousins are still kicking our backsides in visual symbol recognition speed contests.