Slashdot Mirror
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)
Why would you want to memorize Asians?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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
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?
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.
Did the monkeys have a hat on?
God spoke to me.
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
Thanks for that insight Coco! Now get back in your cage and stop using my Wi-Fi!
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Property is theft.
To be accurate, they should have used chimpanzees who were attending college.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
"Hello, Fox execs? Yes, I'd like to pitch a new game or reality show entitled 'Are You Smarter Than a Chimpanzee." What? Come on, it's not like you've got anything else worth watching, especially with the writer's strike."
If Tim Burton had know this a few years ago, maybe his crappy remake would have been better.
I think the real argument is that the remake would have been better if we'd let the chimps make the film instead of Tim Burton.
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
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.
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?
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?
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
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?
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.