After watching this video, I don’t think I’d ever play the card game with a chimp if there were money riding on the outcome. Tetsuro Matsuzawa, of Kyoto University, first trained young chimpanzees to touch numerals in order from 1 through 9. Then the primates were put to the test: After touching ‘1’ on a screen, the other numerals turned into white rectangles, and the chimps had to remember where the other numerals appeared and touch them in order. Matsuzawa and colleague Sana Inoue tasked human adults with the same trial. The result? “Young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection—better even than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus following the same procedure,” they reported in . How do you like them, er, bananas?
