Agronesia

This is not exactly new stuff, but I just recently found it.

Chimpanzees are known as a highly intelligent animal. They use stone and wooden tools, hunt in coordination, and can be taught limited sign language. What might be surprising is that on a particular intellectual test devised by Tetsuro Matsuzawa, young chimps outperforms university students.

Here’s a simple explanation of the test, which is actually a fun game:

First, a sequence of numbers are shown on a touchscreen. Soon, the numbers are replaced with white boxes. The player must press the white box that hides the smallest number up to the highest number in order.

So, this game basically tests two stuffs. First is the ability to comprehend number sequence. The number list isn’t always the same, for example one round might give you all whole numbers from 1 to 9, while other round might give you only “1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9”. The second thing tested is your memory power. During the test, the uncloaked numbers can appear for as short as 210 milliseconds!

On the test, the human participant failed a lot while the young chimps regarded it as a piece of cake. They seem to possess great photographic memory!

You can try to play the web-based game. After being humbled, get even more humbled by watching the video of the chimps playing it.

Tags: Animal, Ape, Chimp, Chimpanzee, Game, Intelligence, Memory, Number, Research

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 8:53 am by Agro Rachmatullah and is filed under Random findings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.