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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: 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. 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. For much of its existence, the primary investigator has been Dr. Tetsuro Matsuzawa. 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. A 2013 paper written by Matsuzawa summarized the methodology and findings of the decades-long project: The young chimpanzees performed better in terms of speed and accuracy than both their own mothers and human adults. 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 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: It is important to note, however, that chimpanzees, as a whole, did not outperform humans. The 2007 research paper that provided these initial results tested three mother-offspring pairs against the performance of seven university student volunteers. Adult chimpanzees did not outperform humans, and the most impressive results came from just one of the juveniles named Ayumu. Other researchers have argued that the methodology does not allow for a true comparison of memory between humans and chimpanzees, because chimps had extensive practice and training learning the mechanics of the experiment while human participants did not. Responding to a 2010 Science feature that highlighted Matsuzawa’s work, University of California, Santa Cruz psychology professors Peter Cook and Margaret Wilson penned a letter published in a later issue of that journal: The study Cook and Wilson cite was written by Alan Silberberg and David Kearns, both professors of psychology at American University in Washington, D.C. In this study, the two authors replicated the methods of the Ayuma study with themselves as participants. The main difference was that the authors allowed themselves more time to practice. They concluded that: Chimpanzees do indeed have have a surprisingly good ability to memorize the locations of sequential symbols, as shown in the video. What is less clear is how that ability compares to humans and, as a result, what this means for both human and chimpanzee cognitive development.
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