Gibber-gabber
How is your memory? Watch Ayumu the Chimp play a memory game.
beingzoe 2008-09-07 16:40:15 UTC

Simply amazing. Ayumu seems to get it right almost every round. Honestly I doubt I would do very well at this game. I would always get one though, maybe two. I better start taking fish oil or a chimp is going to take over my life.

After doing some more research I found out that Ayumu is a five year old chimp who performed the best during memory experiments at Kyoto University under the supervision of researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa.

“No one can imagine that chimpanzees — young chimpanzees at the age of 5 — have a better performance in a memory task than humans” – Tetsuro Matsuzawa

What was astounding was that while the chimps were no better than humans on average, the chimps were faster. Ayumu was the best and was pitted against college students for the challenge. Numbers flashed on the screen for seven-tenths of a second allowed both the humans and the chimp to score at about 80% accuracy. But when the numbers were flashed on the screen for four-tenths, and even two-tenths of a second, Ayumu maintained 80% accuracy, while the human scores dropped to 40%.

You can read the full article about Ayumu at CNN.com

Try your hand at the experiment at this CNN interactive quiz