How to play the chimpanzee test
Numbered squares appear on the board, four to begin with. Tap them in order, starting from 1. As soon as you make that first tap, the other numbers are covered and you finish from memory. Each board you clear adds one more number to the next. A wrong tap is a strike, and the third strike ends the run. Your score is the largest board you cleared.
Do chimps really beat humans?
On one task, yes. In 2007 Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University reported an experiment in which numerals appeared on a touchscreen and were then masked by blank squares. The job was to touch the squares in numerical order.
A young chimpanzee called Ayumu outperformed university students. The gap was widest when the numerals were visible for only an instant.
| Five numerals shown for about 210 milliseconds | Trials correct |
|---|---|
| Ayumu | Around 80 percent |
| University students | Roughly 40 percent |
Why the answer is not a simple yes
Ayumu had done the task thousands of times. The students were close to beginners. When later researchers gave human volunteers long practice on the same task, some of them reached his level of accuracy.
So the fair summary is this: on one narrow task, at one very short display time, a highly practiced chimp beat unpracticed humans. That is striking, but it does not show that chimps have better memories in general or that they are smarter.
Matsuzawa suggested that young chimpanzees may have something like a photographic memory for a scene. It is worth knowing that in adult humans such a memory has never been convincingly demonstrated, as the photographic memory test page explains.
How this version compares
The hardest lab condition limited how long you could look. Here you can study the board for as long as you like before tapping 1, and the difficulty comes from the growing count of numbers. To get closer to the original, set yourself a rule: make your first tap within two seconds.
Most people clear boards of 7 to 9 numbers. The full score table and tips are on the chimp test page, and the working memory test page explains the skill behind it.