“Do Young Chimpanzees Have Extraordinary Working Memory?”, Peter Cook, Margaret Wilson2010-08 (Algernon’s Law, DNB; backlinks; similar)⁠:

Do chimpanzees have better spatial working memory than humans? In a previous report, a juvenile chimpanzee outperformed 3 university students on memory for briefly displayed digits in a spatial array (Inoue & Matsuzawa2007). The authors described these abilities as extraordinary and likened the chimpanzee’s performance to eidetic memory.

However, the chimpanzee received extensive practice on a non-time-pressured version of the task; the human subjects received none.

Here we report that, after adequate practice, 2 university students substantially outperformed the chimpanzee.

There is no evidence for a superior or qualitatively different spatial memory system in chimpanzees.

See Also:

• On the Working Memory of Humans and Great Apes: Strikingly Similar or Remarkably Different?

• The Structure of Individual Differences in the Cognitive Abilities of Children and Chimpanzees § Table 1. Primate Cognition Test Battery: Description of Tasks and Mean Proportion (With Standard Deviation) of Correct Responses by Chimpanzees and Human Children

• The Structure of Individual Differences in the Cognitive Abilities of Children and Chimpanzees

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