![]() ![]() "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.īook Description Taschenbuch. Based on real, cutting-edge science, Are You Smarter Than a Chimpanzee? makes us laugh, makes us think and above all makes us question our assumptions about our place in the animal kingdom. Along the way, Ambridge debunks a plethora of common myths about animals and reveals the bizarre and wonderful science being done at the extreme end of zoology, where animal psychologists are designing personality tests for donkeys and logic problems for pigeons. Are You Smarter Than a Chimpanzee? is a collection of ingenious tests, puzzles, quizzes and games that pits the reader against a range of extraordinary creatures to show that, from dolphins that understand grammar to parrots that can add up, via fetishist quails and the ant-swarms outsmarting the world's best mathematicians, the animal kingdom is more than a match for anything mankind has to offer. But all animals - us included - are pretty special. We are their evolutionary neighbours.What makes humans special? What makes us different from animals? Psy-Q author Ben Ambridge's entertaining, illuminating new book has a surprising answer: less than you might think. ![]() “We underestimate chimpanzee intelligence,” he says. Matsuzawa emphasises that the chimps in the study are by no means special – all chimps can perform like this, he says. In the wild, this memory skill might be useful for memorising fruit locations at a glance, or making a quick map of all the branches and routes in a tree, he says. He says that chimp intelligence is chronically underestimated, and one reason is that experiments stack the deck against the chimps. The results are “absolutely incredible” says Frans de Waal, at the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, US. “Rather than taking such findings as a rare example or a fluke, we should incorporate this knowledge into a mindset that acknowledges that chimpanzees – and probably other species – share aspects of what we think of as uniquely human intelligence.” “Observing that other species can outperform us on tasks that we assume we excel at is a bit humbling,” she says. ![]() The finding challenges human assumptions about our uniqueness, and should make us think harder about ourselves in relation to other animals, says anthropologist Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University, Ames, US. “We had to lose some function to get a new function.” ‘Humbling’ discovery “In the course of evolution we humans lost it, but acquired a new skill of symbolisation – in other words, language,” he says. He suggests that early humans lost the skill as we acquired other memory-related skills such as representation and hierarchical organisation. (See a video library of chimp cognition.) In rare cases, human children have a kind of photographic memory like that shown by the young chimps, but it disappears with age, says Tetsuro Matsuzawa, at the primate research institute at Kyoto University, Japan, who led the study. This suggests that they use a kind of eidetic or photographic memory. The youngsters easily remembered the locations, even at the shortest duration, which does not leave enough time for the eye to move and scan the screen. While the adult chimps were able to remember the location of the numbers in the correct order with the same or worse ability as the humans, the three adolescent chimps outperformed the humans. Using an ability akin to photographic memory, the young chimps were able to memorise the location of the numerals with better accuracy than humans performing the same task.ĭuring the test, the numerals appeared on the screen for 650, 430 or 210 milliseconds, and were then replaced by blank white squares. The chimps had previously been taught the ascending order of the numbers.
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