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Chimps Outscore College Students on Memory Test
AP's Malcolm Ritter reports that young chimpanzees were better at remembering a series of numbers flashed on a screen, than the Japanese college students used as a control group. Scientists plan to repeat the experiment using 5th graders against the great apes.
I demand blood alcohol content tests!
...
At least make the chimps do banana flavored shots the night before
I, for one, welcome our new... umm... er, ah what were they again?
Was the test given before or after the students had a kegger?
It might explain the chimps score.
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
From TFA:"Even with six months of training, three students failed to catch up to the three young chimps, Matsuzawa said in an e-mail."
Wondering what/how they trained, I'd bet that (some inner) martial arts training would have helped to improve, say, 'speed of holistic perception'.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Yeah, well, did they control for hangover?
Why would you want to memorize Asians?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
"Scientists plan to repeat the experiment using 5th graders against the great apes."
Run out of contestants for the game show, did we?
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
This just reinforces the notion that "Survival of the Fittest" no longer applies to the human race and signifies the beginning of what will eventually become the land from the Planet of the Apes.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
They were going to try the test on Boston students, but they mistook the numbers for a bomb and detonated the lab equipment.
A large group of chimpanzees has produced the collected works of Shakespeare four times faster than the same number of college students, and with fewer spelling errors.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
That a chimp would do it faster. A human would instinctively put a "name" on each number seen, thus slowing down the "processing".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
in 4...3...2...85...
The chimps scored better than the college students on memory tests, but their term papers were only marginally better.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
FTA "But when the numbers were displayed for just four-tenths or two-tenths of a second, the chimp was the champ. The briefer of those times is too short to allow a look around the screen, and in those tests Ayumu still scored about 80 percent, while humans plunged to 40 percent." So basically the chimp can see something and remember it better than a human...but like Heavy Gunner said from The Orange Box "Some people think they can outsmart me. maybe, maybe. I have yet to meet one that can outsmart bullet."
Why would you want to memorize Asians?
:)
If they happen to be the female of the specicies, then I have a few ideas
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The best part about this news story is when you reach the
end of the article and the researchers reveal that
their results are basically meaningless because you
can get the same results by testing children versus adults.
The real question is how to human children compare with the young chimpanzees.
Is it possible that the chimps selected for this experiment just have an exceptionally good memory for chimps, maybe even photographic memories? It may be that we're comparing the Stephen Hawkings of chimps with a random sample of college students. We should have Stephen Hawking take the test to make it fair.
Can someone braver than I test this URL (also at work, so wary of anything NSFW)? I have a sneaking suspicion that that link points to either goatse, tubgirl, or possibly 2girls1cup... none of which I wish to subject myself to at this moment.
Did the monkeys have a hat on?
God spoke to me.
Phony McRing-Ring: "...scientists have discovered that even monkeys can memorize 10 numbers! Are you stupider than a monkey?"
Chief Wiggum: "Mmmmeh, How big of a monkey?"
Call me a luddite, but with everything modern society forces us to remember/memorize, memorizing jibberish on a test will suffer greatly by the increased load. Hence, monkeys with the reduced load on their memory will outperform their more intelligent cousins.
Disclaimer: I *am* a College Student.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
I am positive that, after 6 years (2 degrees) of drinking and sleep deprivation, I am significantly dumber than I was going in to school.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
When your brain doesn't have quite as much high-level conceptualization, optimizing for memorizing simpler patterns is probably a little easier. The gut reaction from this story is "OMG chimps are smarter than people!!!"
But the same human mind that isn't quite as good at memorizing sequences can easily do things that the chimps (or computers or pidgeons) can't, for example paraphrase in their own words the story of Goldilocks and Three Bears. I'm curious if the pidgeons (which are "programmable" in a lot of ways, but with presumably even less complex thought overhead than chimps) are even better at being programmed at this numbers-memorization technique than the chimps.
If Tim Burton had know this a few years ago, maybe his crappy remake would have been better.
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
Property is theft.
... chimps smoke less pot than college students. Crap forgot where that source study came from...
That's just my POV... no more, no less.
GNAA
Troll link in parent. Takes over the browser window and plays annoying sound.
College students are known for being heavy drinkers. Japanese people have a bit of a reputation for the same.
Either that or the Japanese education system isn't quite the world-beater we were told it was.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
To be accurate, they should have used chimpanzees who were attending college.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Does this mean we'll have to replace the premise of "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?"
If you've played games which emphasize short term memory (the card game Concentration, where you need to remember where cards are located while they are face down) against a little kid, you'll realize there are some interesting effects with kids' memory being excellent in this regard. Grown adults are definitely not as good as little kids at those kind of games- the only way I could beat my niece was by maximizing distraction. When the cards were laid out in a grid as she was accustomed to, she would reliably beat me if I couldn't distract her. The only times I was able to beat her were by scattering the cards haphazardly... It's somewhat humiliating to be trying your hardest and lose to someone who can just barely read... So there may be some specialization that takes place, and adults/college students have probably lost some of their peak short-term memory ability as they have developed higher-level analysis skills. It kind of makes me slightly wish I'd taken psych in college (years ago) instead of econ... (Not really, econ was cake...)
"The chimps were rewarded with raisins or apple cubes for correct answers." It seems to be me that the chimps actually had the motivation to remember these numbers. I bet if you offered those people some Cake they'd pass that test just fine. This can't be that surprising though, given how much information there is in the world today, humans are overloaded with things we need to remember. As a result we have become more reliant on artificial means for memorizing facts: notes, books, PDAs, contact lists with numbers and addresses. Our brains just can't handle All the information we need in a day, so we've had to supplement them with technology. We don't even really need to remember much apart from where we have the information kept at. Hell, most people probably just Google up the info that they need anyways. Compare the memory of people in modern industrial countries with those that live in more traditional cultures with rich oral traditions and you'll probably find a similar gap in memory I would guess.
I for one welcome our new chimp overlords.
Read his question again.
He was asking if his hypothetical chimps should be memorizing Asians. Not if he should be memorizing Asians himself.
The chimp results don't surprise me. I'm more interested in the Japanese College Students vs. Fifth Graders competition.
college students were found to be better at flinging poo than chimps.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I work at a college help desk and the chimps never call.
That's not fair. The chimps didn't have hangovers.
Sure, the chimps beat the test. And how many people do you know could weave a spider web from silk? Very few. Of course, those chimps didn't drive themselves to the testing station, didn't sign their names and fill out the forms, etc. So clearly more is going on than just memory = intelligence.
stuff |
The chimps clearly can *memorize* the screen faster than a human. That is photographic memory. In experimental sciences, the experiment is the truth. This is the experiment that shows that the monkey was able to view and memorize the screen faster than a human. And no, monkeys see about the same as we do.
It is sad that the only thing we can come up with is a childish "no, we are better because I said so! the experiment cannot be true! whahahaha!". Sad. We are just a creature with limits and this experiment shows this. We should accept the results and move on. The results should humble us (oh, and it is another nail in the "humans are gods of animal world" coffin) and not start to deny the truth (experiment).
So, was the chimp lucky, smarter or is this some trait we don't, as of yet, comprehend?
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
The article itself contains a flawed summary. This does nothing to prove the ability of chimps to memorize numbers better than humans, but it does show a greater ability toward pattern recognition. That's not intelligence. In fact, I'd expect that given that pattern recognition is primarily a function of the ability to recognize a predator and/or food that isn't good for you. Given that we as human beings haven't had any significant predators and really don't forage for food (generally, there are exceptions) for thousands of years, you'd expect those lesser-used parts of the brain to "grow limp". A chimp, on the other hand has a certain biological imperative to be able to recognize predators early in life. Chimps that don't, don't perpetuate.
:)
There's also a factor that there are some biological differences between our species; like the physical fact that chimps can move their eyes faster and have physically smaller bodies therefore nerve impulses don't take so long to travel to the limbs.
Frankly, I fail to see what has been proven here. Maybe I'm missing something because I'm not a chimp
FYI, here's the video library.
Look closely at two comparable tests:
There's a BIG difference in the testing: the human gets no cookies! <grin>
But seriously, I have to admit it is an intriguing test. What I would love to see, though, is another set of test runs which compared chimps with some serious gamers!
Whoosh!
(He knows what the GP meant, I'm sure. But if you read his question again, you might note how the broken grammar implies memorizing Asians. Hence the joke. Which you missed. Which made a whooshing sound as it flew over your head.)
everything in moderation
Good thing then for Brighteyes (Taylor) that they didn't use a combination lock on the cages. He'd have been stuck there with that girl forever. She was a cutie though thats for sure so it may have not been a bad thing over all. ;)
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
... can take second semester organic chemistry for me. I had to take that abysmal class twice because I couldn't memorize the material quickly enough the first time around.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
So the basis for "chimps have better memory than humans" is with the ability to memorize patterns displayed for a split second. Even the article admits that the college students lost to the chimp when the patterns were displayed for shorter periods of time. It doesn't seem like an intelligence thing, it seems like a reflex thing, which I absolutely expect primates to be superior at. So I suggest that the test be done again with chimps vs. hardcore gamers, ones who win international Half Life competitions, or Tetris competitions, or anything requiring extreme hand-eye coordination. I'm sure we'd beat those filthy stinking apes!
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
For example animals which feed by catching fast moving bugs in their mouth (eg. birds and fish) need to respond very quickly otherwise their food is long gone. Animals that eat berries and kill their food or have paws and hands don't have to be that fast. Animals that live in trees etc and need to judge distance better (monkeys etc) need faster responses than ground based humans etc.
I forget what this effect is called, but I understand that trout have a speed 20x that of humans. That's to be expected when a trout has to feed by eating little bugs coming past it in fast moving water. The trout has to be able to respond quickly to make an energy efficient movement and get the bug before it has gone. The energy in a small gnat is not enough to waste on charging around the stream.
As a result of this, I'm not at all suprised that a chimp beats a human in a low level counting game.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Will Jeff Foxworthy be the host?
Asians are cheaper. Stay clear of simian scabs.
AFL/CIO, Asian Chapter
Let's use the real collegiate measure. How good is their football team?
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
Next thing you know, they're going to be saying that monkeys chained to a keyboard can produce better reports than college students.
To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were capable of staying awake long enough.
You may want to get your ears checked. That 'wooshing' sound was closer than you thought.
Chimps can remember better than humans, well eagles can see better, cheetahs can run faster, and a gorilla could kick your ass in a fight.
When the apes start adding up numbers, that would be interesting, and when they start riding horses and firing guns, that would be news.
Also does this mean we have to change the elephants never forget thing to chimps?
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
I'll worry about today's youth when the studies show George Bush is smarter than college students.
Along with the more scientific theories given in the article as to why the young chimps do it faster than the human adults is: chimps don't know it's supposed to be hard. To the chimps, it may be just a game with no pressure. For the adults, the pride of humanity is at stake.
It's like some savant kids: no one has ever told them they can't play piano like Mozart, so they just do it.
Health Insurance Quotes
Think about it, most IT work these days isn't critical thinking and analytical work, but merely the memorization of the latest trends and APIs, and re-writing the same old crap in a new job using a different set of tools. So, monkeys are going to have a leg up. They aren't very much more ill behaved than web designers, don't smell as bad, dress about the same, and they have similar toiletry habits.
I wonder if they will be any more manageable?
named "Cornelius"....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
But, call me when the chimps design and conduct the experiment.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
But I'm almost positive he wanted to be called T-Bone.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
The best thing about this story is that the study was done in Japan, and therefore my tax dollars did not pay for it.
If they see a slight variation on the pattern that you give them and ask them to deduce something, they don't even bother trying and have a good laugh at how you are such a bastard.
maybe the reward pellets you're using aren't tasty enough.
Seems like microSantaSoft doesn't/didn't want to be outdone:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/03/santa_filth_outrage/
"El Reg says: Maybe you shouldn't eat it?
Santa says: See if you can get someone else to eat it!
El Reg says: Eat it
Santa says: No thank you. I don't eat things!
El Reg says: Eat it
Santa says: See if you can get someone else to eat it!
El Reg says: Eat it
Santa says: You want me to eat what?!? It's fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else...
El Reg says: You dirty bastard!
Santa says: I think you're dirty bastard."
Sounds like the msfot devs need DNA testing, BAC testing, and more... AI at its best?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Of course the monkeys have better memory skills than the humans. Monkeys still depend on memorization to get things done; humans, OTOH, don't bother to memorize anything anymore since it's easier to just look everything up on Google. We're completely out of practice.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I'll bet those chimps were captured in Korea. I wanna see tests comparing good ol' American chimps versus our guys.
My daughter's deceased hamster outscored me on a memory test, and that was after the little beast had been dead for a year.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
For College Students try having them pick out brands of beer, or maybe arrange glasses from full down to empty. Let's see how the Chimp does on that one.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
I wonder how they will explain this one?
Some people seem confused by what the article is saying. It's not a matter of the speed of response. It's that, (at least in the second experiment) given a briefer view of the numbers, the chimps were able to recall the order of the numbers more accurately than people. A view lasting 7/10 of a second, people and chimps did about the same, but when you cut the viewing time to 4/10 or 2/10, the chimp's accuracy didn't go down, while the humans' accuracy dropped significantly.
As for why this kind of makes sense, if I were to hypothesize on it, I'd say it's probably because we ARE more intelligent that we don't perform as well with the briefer views. There's a good deal of abstract thought going on in how we deal with the numbers and different people deal with them differently. It's this ability of more and deeper abstract thought that's displacing our ability to simply see the whole thing as a single picture, but a collection of items.
On the other hand, I suspect the chimps are simply seeing a picture and recreating that picture with the tools provided. The picture holds no real meaning to them. There's no indication that the chimps understand what the digits mean. They wouldn't know 3 apples from 4 apples in terms of the digits. But human subjects, on the other hand, assign meaning to those numbers. Patterns might grab our attention. If in the digits, for example, I saw 68 in the series, it might bring to mind the year of my birth and that might distract my attention from memorizing the other digits in the number. A chimp, on the other hand, won't see the digits "02" and think, "Hey, that was the year of my birth."
And that's not to say animals don't know the concept of numbers. They do, or at least some do. There have certainly been studies to show that dogs can count up to about 5 or so (maybe it was higher) with quite a bit of accuracy, and not as something their taught, but simply intuitively... But I digress. I think the results make a lot of sense. Even though my description is probably not specifically what's going on, I wouldn't be surprised if it were something along those lines. Sure, it may make us less efficient at some simple tasks, but what's more valuable? Being able to accurately remember the order of the digits or to know what they mean?
You must be new here.
Thank goodness you at least didn't make any spelling or grammatical errors.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Scientists plan to repeat the experiment using 5th graders against the great apes.
$20 says this gets air time on NBC.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
It's about time that chimps learn about the cheaper labor that college provides. They'll certainly be buying quite a few bananas off of the money they're saving.
Obviously they must've gotten the college students from the School of Business, maybe even the marketing program. They tend to be complete dumbasses.
If they're really short on people who have IQs closely matching that of the Chimps, then they may have went to the Agricultural Journalism program. Most football players can be found there.
Just a few suggestions.
Would an ape make a human doll that TALKS?
I for one welcome our new damn dirty ape overlords.
Posting as AC because even I didn't find this joke funny.
Property is theft.
Can they install Linux? No, wait...can they crash Windows? Crap, that's not it either...
At least I can peel a banana without using my feet. I also have enough brain power to know that the crap that lives on someones unclean head isn't something I want to put in my body however tasty it might be.
This is Slashdot! Give me the latest gadget, bug, or OS project! This ain't english class so don't confuse the two!
Only the most monumentally stupid college students would voluntarily participate in any study like this, it's a waste of time.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
So that's why we put them in suits and give them cushy positions in government!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Except he's having the apes memorize them. Kind of defeats the purpose.
Let's see those chimps down a few beer bongs first and then see how bright they are... stupid chimps!
The chimps all got drunk, then called their parents for more money.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Were the monkeys smoking as much pot as todays college students do?
Smokedot.org
My memory is fading, sometimes I pop the blue pill - but I am still on the top of the food chain when I monkey around in this universe.
I wonder if the motivation was the same. If the rewrd for getting it right was an apple. the chimp might really, really want an apple. A doubt they rewarded the students with fruit and I doubt they gave the chips money. How could they know if the two groups had equal motivation and worked as hard to get a correct answer?
No no, his comment about you not getting his sarcastic comment was sarcastic, implying that he thought that *your* comment was serious! I can't believe you fell for the oldest trick in the book! What a fool. What's with you man?
Better than college students in every way.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm disappointed that people are still performing testing on US Presidents. I thought we left that sort of thing behind years ago.
meh
I undertand where you are coming from. I teach elementry grades and many teachers use "reward" systems. I'm pretty reserved about rewards for behavior and never telll students they will get something for god behavior... I don't want to associate good performance with rewards.
However, I think that, many times, we consider the "reward pellet" to be someting tangible. The "reward" I dole out the most is praise.. and, to be honest, kids eat it right up...as do adults. "Nice job Greg" or "Tommy, I've been really impressed with your behavior this week, keepit up" or even "Janie, what a terrific story, you must have put a lot of work into it". Sometimes, the "reward" doesn't have to be anything more than a compliment. Even as an adult, when someonenotices I've done something good, it feels damn goo to know it and be told I'm doing a nice job. I don't recall many professors telling me that I did nice work on a project, and the few times they did... I felt really good.
Get your hands off my spreadsheet, you damn, dirty apes!
I was jailed once.
There we had phone cards with a long number (12 digits) and we needed to buy them to be able to call our families.
Almost everyone there were able to memorize that number just reading it once. A short glance will mean you lost your credit. Most people would memorize the numbers in privacy to avoid showing the card in public. I aquired that hability in just 5 minutes of needing it. I could only do it once, when I was really inside everybody would be ultracareful with their cards.
So the only reason humans don't do it is because we are lazy and rely on notebooks and other stuff to remember things. Put pressure on the test subjects and they will outperform the chimps.
Like Desmond Morris says: we are not fallen angels, but risen apes. These results mean more humble-pie for human-kind.
The college students I mean. Everyone knows that the average monkey knows how to administer a Linux box.
Badges!?! We don't need no stinking badges!
Perhaps humans have more interesting things to think and feel boring when seeing flashing numbers on a screen, causing them to score slower than chimps?
It's a sad day when asians get beat at numbers.
This is precisely how Planet of the Apes happened, at least in the Tim Burton 2001 remake. o_o
preview on future slashdot posts...
"keeek keeek keek kook kook kek keeeeeeeeeek"
I am sure, google will work on a GoogleChimp really soon.... for chimps to search online...
First post! Oh no, some chimps have beaten me...
"Are you smarter than a Room full of Chimps" next on FOX !
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
What you say may be true, but in the case of this study, we're looking specifically at memory only, not the power of respective brains.
As an analogy, consider two knives of the same make; one is really sharp and the other really dull. The sharp one is the better knife, since it is better at what knives are supposed to do - cut things up.
You may say their performance will depend on other parameters like how fast and hard the person wielding it swings. That is true, but the point still is: A sharper knife is a better knife is a sharper knife.
Therefore, better memory still is better memory. It may be an inefficient use of the limited space available by "allocating more resources" to short-term memory, but in this study we're restricting ourselves precisely to that - Comparison of short-term memory between Chimps and Humans.
...to tune in next week when we do the ol' take a leak on the electric outlet, half-assed-gorillas vs. half-assed-office-workers!!!!
That, that really grinds my gears!
He escaped!
Why, Why, Oh God Why didn't I break his legs?
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
It's because they rewarded the college students with bananas. They score better if the reward is Top Ramen.
Table-ized A.I.
Exactly. It seems to me that memory capacity is largely a function of contextual information, and understanding of the subject at hand.
For instance, remembering many-digit numbers is hard, but if grouped into sets of four digits that you happen to know well as unicode code points, then it'd be much easier. Although I have more respect for animals as peers than most people, this gives humans better memories than chimps, almost by definition.
I don't know about others, but personally, my recall is very bad, unless I give myself time to recall related context first. When remembering information, I seem to store it as links with related things, not as a fact simply "in" my head. That means, when I'm working on the same subject as I need to remember something on, recall is easy. But when someone asks me a question out of the blue about a subject I discussed last thursday for the first time in a month, recall will be much slower. Possibly more flawed, but also possibly just slower.
Hmmmm, I've seen this story before.
Next step: a chimp called Jesus will take control of his lab and spread his ideals through the internet convincing more chimps to stand up.
In 10 years humans will be free from thinking and thus finally enjoying wild life as other slave mamals.
"Scientists plan to repeat the experiment using 5th graders against the great apes." Now that the chimps have beaten the college students, the TV producers eager for ratings will surely going to put them on "Are You Smarter Than a Fith Grader". Ironically the chimps may be smarter than most of the contestants.... Most likely they will win some good money. Once they get a little money they will spend it on alcohol and cheap women. After a few semesters of that, then let them retake the test against the college students. Once they are playing with the same mindset it should be clear whether or not Darwin was right......... We are stupid as monkeys when fueled by alcohol.....
All I see here is a bunch of you hairless wonders making excuses.
Yo bitch, I've got your cerebellum right here.
we pwn j00!
-The Chimps
-Styopa
that beats last month's headline "DOG SAYS N WORD"
Always wondered why banks kept chimps in a room next to the mainframe.