Young chimp beats college students
 

http://news.**********/s/ap/20071203...A2SQ8T0Ris0NUE

NEW YORK - Think you're smarter than a fifth-grader? How about a 5-year-old chimp? Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won.

That challenges the belief of many people, including many scientists, that "humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions," said researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University.

"No one can imagine that chimpanzees — young chimpanzees at the age of 5 — have a better performance in a memory task than humans," he said in a statement.

Matsuzawa, a pioneer in studying the mental abilities of chimps, said even he was surprised. He and colleague Sana Inoue report the results in Tuesday's issue of the journal Current Biology.

One memory test included three 5-year-old chimps who'd been taught the order of Arabic numerals 1 through 9, and a dozen human volunteers.

They saw nine numbers displayed on a computer screen. When they touched the first number, the other eight turned into white squares. The test was to touch all these squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there.

Results showed that the chimps, while no more accurate than the people, could do this faster.


Makes you wonder when chimps start beating college students at various mental tests. Are the chimps getting smarter OR are American college students getting dumber? ;)

*scratches head*

But if the chimps was no more accurate than the people, only faster, then it doesn't imply that they're smarter. Admittedly I haven't read the whole article yet.

Who says they were pitted against American college students, I would think the japanese researchers used japanese students.

Yeah.... Arabic numerals? I doubt that it was American college students... Arabic is a somewhat rarely seen & rarely heard language in the States (from what I've experienced, even though 1 of my best friends is taking it as a minor)... Remember the various bills that were highly publicized about foreigns needing to speak english? It's because the majority of people here don't speak other languages (with any amount of fluency or grammatical correctness, that is...). Because of that, I believe that it wouldn't be in the U.S, or involve U.S. students... Keep in mind that the test only involved a dozen students.... not a very large-scale test, and I'm betting that it only used students from a single college.

Arabic numerals are 1 2 3 4 etc as a matter of fact. Comparative to latin numerals that goes I II III IV etc.

HAH HAH HAH.
That's just too funny.

I suppose in some technical sense the chimps out-performed the humans, but if they weren't any more accurate, it seems a little thin to me. Still, interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if they find some area in which chimps have a more clear cut advantage over humans. They are very close to us, genetically, after all.

Drake

A follow up...

Monkeys and college students as good at mental math

http://news.**********/s/nm/20071218...jwBgS_Zg6s0NUE

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Monkeys performed about as well as college students at mental addition, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a finding that suggests nonverbal math skills are not unique to humans.

The research from Duke University follows the finding by Japanese researchers earlier this month that young chimpanzees performed better than human adults at a memory game.

Prior studies have found non-human primates can match numbers of objects, compare numbers and choose the larger number of two sets of objects.

"This is the first study that looked at whether or not they could make explicit decisions that were based on mathematical types of calculations," said Jessica Cantlon, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at Duke, whose work appeared in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Biology (www.plosbiology.org).

"It shows when you take language away from a human, they end up looking just like monkeys in terms of their performance," Cantlon said in a telephone interview.

Her study pitted the monkey math team of Boxer and Feinstein -- two female macaque monkeys named for U.S. senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California -- with 14 Duke University students.

"We had them do math on the fly," Cantlon said.

The task was to mentally add two sets of dots that were briefly flashed on a computer screen. The teams were asked to pick the correct answer from two choices on a different screen.

The humans were not allowed to count or verbalize as they worked, and they were told to answer as quickly as possible. Both monkeys and humans typically answered within 1 second.

And both groups fared about the same.

Cantlon said the study was not designed to show up Duke University students. "I think of this more as using non-human primates as a tool for discovering where the sophisticated human mind comes from," she said.

The researchers said the findings shed light on the shared mathematical abilities in humans and non-human primates and shows the importance of language -- which allows for counting and more advanced calculations -- in the evolution of math in humans.

"I don't think language is the only thing that differentiates humans from non-human primates, but in terms of math tasks, it is probably the big one," she said.

As for the teams, both were paid. Boxer and Feinstein got their favorite reward: a sip of Kool-Aid soft drink. As for the students, they got $10 each -- enough for a beer or two.

So, there you have it. Most Duke University students do as well at math as chimps...most of the time...if you bribe them with free beer. ;)

Hmmm...makes sense. Chimps invented the internet, and put a chimp on the moon. And invented glow-in-the-dark chimps. And they will soon take over the world and make Earth into Planet of the Apes.

See, that is a great example of a bullshit headline. The study does not support that claim.

Drake