Working Memory and the Planet of the Apes
You may remember the 1968 movie, the Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston played an astronaut, Taylor, who crash-landed on an alien planet of super-smart apes. He was imprisoned by the apes and, after escaping, he sees the Statue of Liberty, fallen to the ground. That’s when he realises, the alien planet was Earth all along! The super-smart apes have taken over the world.
This sounds far-fetched, right? Apes will never be smarter than humans . . . right? Well, in fact, they are already smarter than us. In a study by Japanese researchers*, five-year-old chimpanzees were able to correctly recall the location and sequence of numbers on a computer screen, and even outperformed university students!
What gives the chimps the edge on this working memory task? A couple of things: Biology and Age.
Biology: Chimps have an amazing photographic memory—an ability to quickly look at a very complex scene and retain an accurate image of it. They use this ability in the wild to quickly asses any potential dangers. Humans don’t have this ability, but it is not necessarily a bad thing. Scientists believe that humans gave up this skill to make room in the brain for developing complex language skills.
Age: This visual memory has been found in some human children but this ability fades as we get older. This aging effect is found even in chimps as the older chimps did worse on the task than the university students. So, the five-year-old chimps had the advantage of age compared to the college students.
*S. Inoue & T. Matsuzawa (2007). Current Biology
