Physical testing procedures in the studies themselves also differed between the species, favoring humans. Research apes also have been been deprived of similar social interactions that humans are exposed to, potentially stunting their abilities. “All direct ape-human comparisons that have reported human superiority in cognitive function have universally failed to match the groups on testing environment, test preparation, sampling protocols, and test procedures,” they wrote.įor example, historically, apes have been tested through bars, while humans understandably have not. Perhaps this bias is why, as a team of researchers argued in a 2017 paper, studies comparing human and ape cognition have for decades been methodologically biased against apes.
It views our mind as so original that there is no point comparing it to other minds except to confirm its exceptional status.” This idea remains prevalent in much of the social sciences, philosophy, and the humanities. Without saying so explicitly, it assumes that evolution stopped at the human head. “Its central tenet is that we descend from the apes in body but not in mind. Then the player had to click the remaining boxes in the order of their prior numbers. When a player hit the number one, all the other numbers were replaced with blank boxes. Both chimpanzee and human subjects played a game in which they were displayed the numbers one through nine on a screen in varying locations. Only half of the eight-year-olds and less than one tenth of the 4-year-olds figured out this solution.Ī third study, conducted all the way back in 2007, showcases chimpanzees’ commanding edge over humans in working memory, the ability to quickly remember information and apply it soon thereafter. When tested at the Yerkes Primate Center in Georgia, chimpanzees quickly learned to fill their mouth with water from the nearby drinking fountain and spit it into the tube, raising the peanut to the surface.
The treat can’t be shaken or dumped out, and it’s inaccessible by reaching in with a finger. Here, kids and chimps simply face the conundrum of a peanut or treat placed at the bottom of a vertical transparent tube that’s locked in place. Considering that chimpanzee society tends to be competitive while human society is often more collaborative, it makes sense that chimps would have an edge in rudimentary competitive strategizing.Īnother test in which chimpanzees top humans - in this case, four- and eight-year-olds - is called the inaccessible peanut task. The researchers found that chimpanzees would reach this “equilibrium” well before humans. Ultimately, an ideal game develops an optimal pattern predicted by game theory, in which each player makes the most strategic choice possible. A chimp would sit down with another chimp and play a basic strategy game, essentially a variation of “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” in which each player would have to learn from the other’s past moves to predict what their competitor would do next. Are you smarter than a chimp?įor example, in a 2014 study, scientists at the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute pitted pairs of humans and pairs of chimpanzees against each other in a competitive game. True, chimpanzees have yet to master flight, manufacture semiconductors, or cure a disease, but there are a number of basic cognitive tasks where, in a battle between human and ape, they come out on top. Though humans share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, we regularly shrug off the biological similarity with a haughty air of superiority, confident that our cognitive abilities - endowed by a brain three times larger, with 14 billion more neurons - firmly trounce theirs.
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