Human adults appear to have lost this extraordinary ability for eidetic memory. In contrast, humans always recognize things within a social context, paying preferential attention to people, as agents.Ĭhimpanzee-like photographic memory may well aid individuals in their everyday life. Chimpanzees apparently focus on any salient objects, neglecting the social context. The ability for juvenile chimpanzees to outperform both humans and older peers led Matsuzawa and others to propose that a chimp’s remarkable photographic (eidetic) memory compared to humans represents an evolutionary tradeoff between visual memory and language:Ĭhimpanzees are good at capturing images rapidly as a whole, while humans are better at understanding the meaning of what they see. Ayumu, the most skilled participant, can do the task with nine numerals at 5.5-year old, with a latency of 0.67 seconds to touch the first number and a level of accuracy above 80 percent, which cannot be achieved by human subjects even if they are trained for an extended period of time. The young chimpanzees performed better in terms of speed and accuracy than both their own mothers and human adults. This is not an easy task for humans however, three out of three young chimpanzees succeeded. Upon touching the lowest number, the remaining eight numbers are masked by white squares and subjects are then required to touch the masked stimuli in ascending order of the hidden numerals. Once trained to criterion on this task, we introduced a masking task to measure working memory ability. Specifically, chimpanzees can learn to touch the Arabic numerals, 1–9, in ascending order. The most striking difference reported to date between the two species is a remarkable ability to use visual working memory in young chimpanzees, who can outperform even adult humans on certain tasks. Some of this work is conducted in the form of single-subject testing of both chimps and humans at a computer terminal, where a variety of visual memory and cognitive tests are administered.Ī 2013 paper written by Matsuzawa summarized the methodology and findings of the decades-long project: Matsuzawa and his colleagues have published numerous peer-reviewed studies based on this and similar experimental setups, and have been conducting experiments similar to the one shown in the above video since 1978. The project (named “The Ai Project” after the original chimpanzee subject), focuses on “the perceptual and cognitive capabilities of chimpanzees rather than communicative skills between humans and chimpanzees.”įor much of its existence, the primary investigator has been Dr. The video is a portion of a lecture given by professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute at the 2013 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS.
A video of a chimpanzee memorizing and quickly remembering the location of numbers on a screen has been appearing on social media since at least 2013, along with text that suggests no human is capable of performing this task:
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