Working memory... less is sometimes more

How good's your working memory? Better than a 7 year old chimpanzee called Ayumu?

We happened across a fascinating CNN article a while ago on research at the Primate Research Institute (Kyoto University), where a number of chimps have been learning linguistic skills.

The experiment below is on working memory and numerals. Ayumu is shown a series of unique numbers (between 1 to 9) in random locations on a screen. After 0.21s, each number is then covered by a blank square - at which point Ayumu has to press on the blank boxes to match the original numerical sequence.

Play the clip below before reading on - make sure you're concentrating :-)




Amazing - and Ayumu didn't even appear to be concentrating that hard!

When repeated with students (who spent 3 months practising) they couldn't equal this chimp's feat (80% accuracy, cf. 40% for the students).

One aspect of success was age: the ability to remember a 'snapshot' of information decreases with onset of adulthood (young chimp vs. adult human). A theory on top of this is that the human brain 'loses' some of its working memory abilities to be able to apply itself to bigger and better things - for example language, and higher order thinking.

There's a lot more at the excellent CNN article, where you can even try these tests out for yourself! And if you want to know more about Ayumu and his friends, click here.