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Chimpanzees Beat out Children in Reasoning Test

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the monkey-see-monkey-do dept.

caffeinemessiah writes "The New York Times has a story on how chimpanzees seem to exhibit a better understanding of cause and effect than human children. While training chimps to perform a routine task with redundant steps, the chimps were able to figure out and eliminate the redundant steps, while the human children routinely performed them despite their evident uselessness. It says something about the way we learn compared to chimps and should be interesting to cognitive scientists and those interested in computational learning theory, at the least."

2 of 663 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is just stupid by Nyph2 · · Score: 3, Informative

    heh, funny you mention why hot pizza burns your mouth. Most people assume it's the oil/cheese... but it's actually the sauce.
    The specific heat of water is much higher than that of oil, which means the oil heats up quicker, but also loses its heat quicker. Top this with the insulating effect the cheese gives the sauce, and the sauce can end up staying overly hot for quite some time.
    Anyhoo, im not sure quite why a study of that would be needed, but I for one find looking at it from the angle of specific heat is pretty interesting.

  2. Re:Well? by onedotzero · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hrm. Do I go for the:
    +1 Funny: Because it's hot. Hot <anything> burns. It doesn't have to be pizza.

    Or the:
    +1 Informative/Boring: The roof of your mouth is particularly sensitive; it's part of the body's temperature monitors. It's this sensor that triggers brain freeze when you eat something cold. The sensor thinks you're far too cold, and your brain tells blood to rush to your head. The amount of blood is higher than the veins and capillaries can take, and bottlenecks. And it hurts.

    Tough call...