Clever Chimps or Dumb Humans?
New work in zoology is leading to changes in the way science and society view animals. We know that chimpanzees are smart in comparison to most other animals and that they are often capable of complex behaviors which require rethinking basic assumptions. A new study has shown that chimps have solid short-term memory and are able to outperform humans in some tests.
Researchers in Japan have pitted human adults against five-year-old chimpanzees in a test of mental agility and memory - and the chimps won.
In a test of short-term memory involving numbers flashed on a computer screen, the apes comfortably beat their human opponents.
This astonishing result, published in the journal Current Biology, shows that in at least some respects our position at the top of the intellectual tree may be a bit shakier than we thought.
David MacFarland, in his book Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs argued that humans must assume that any non-human minds we encounter must be significantly different from our own given that such minds will have been naturally selected through different environmental pressures and will have developed different pathways and processes for manipulating sensory input. Chimpanzee intelligence has gained a great deal of respect lately as studies show greater-than-expected abilities. Expect more of this sort of result as we get better at testing animal intelligences with less species-dependent studies.
