Chimpanzees have an extraordinary photographic memory that is far superior to ours, research suggests.
Young chimps outperformed university students in memory tests devised by Japanese scientists. The tasks involved remembering the location of numbers on a screen, and correctly recalling the sequence.
The findings in 2007, published in Current Biology, suggest we may have under-estimated the intelligence of our closest living relatives. Until now, it had always been assumed that chimps could not match humans in memory and other mental skills.
“There are still many people, including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions,” said lead researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University.
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