Young Chimps Have Great Memory

Much is being made of the report that a 7-year-old chimp beat college students in quick memory tests of number patterns. This doesn’t affect human exceptionalism, in my view. What makes us special goes far deeper than memory capacities.

But it also may be less than meets the eye. As we know human children are also better at certain brain functions—such as learning language—than are adults. It’s in the makeup of the brain at different ages. This seems to hold true in the chimps, as well, since the mother of the Brainiac chimp lost to the college students. Plus, the chimp has been playing the game for his entire life. From the story in the Guardian:

Ayumu has had the advantage of playing this game for most of his seven years of life - and receiving a treat each time he did the task. But the researchers do not think training is the only reason he is so good. Three of Matsuzawa’s students received six months of training and never approached his abilities.

Ayumu and the other young chimps’ abilities are reminiscent of “eidetic imagery”, an ability to retain a detailed and accurate image of a complex scene or pattern. This memory ability is present in some children, but declines with age. The experiment compared the chimps with human adults, but not children and the performance of Ayumu’s mother, Ai, was not as good as the humans. Ai, now 31, was the first chimp to be taught the meaning of Arabic numerals in counting.

No doubt chimps are very smart animals. But they are not human. And they shouldn’t be deemed persons under the law, as is being promoted by the Great Ape Project.