So, I managed to find what I think is the original study from which this video came and I’m skeptical that it’s strong evidence for chimps’ working memory exceeding humans’. It does seem like decent evidence for chimp response time being better.
First of all, they picked the best two chimps to compare against humans:
We compared Ai, the best mother performer, Ayumu, the best young performer, and human subjects (n = 9, all university students) in this task.
Second, if I’m reading it correctly, the chimps got more trials in the experiment and had practiced a very similar activity previously.
Each chimpanzee received 10 sessions and each of 9 humans received a single test session.
A ‘masking task’ to test memory was introduced at around the time when the young became five years old. In this task, after touching the first numeral, all other numerals were replaced by white squares. The subject had to remember which numeral appeared in which location, and then touch them based on the knowledge of numerical sequence. All five naïve chimpanzees mastered the masking task, just like Ai.
In other words, the chimps had been practicing a less time-restricted form of the memory activity for years (?) before participating in the experiment. While it’s possible that practice wouldn’t have improved the human scores. that goes against my prior based on the fact that humans can dramatically improve at similar activities such as n-back.
Third, the humans actually did better than one of the two (best performing) monkeys, Ai, and did nearly as well as the best monkey, Ayumu, on the longest hold duration task.
From my perspective, this provides evidence that slower human response time may have played a role in the worse performance in the shorter hold tasks. The authors even mention that the shortest duration is “is close to the frequency of occurrence of human saccadic eye movement”, meaning that a human would only get a flash of the image before it disappeared.
Hmmm interesting, thanks for posting this! Overall the fact that humans are so much smarter than chimps but still have the same-size tiny-on-any-absolute-scale symbolic working memory seems to support my original claim that this is a tragically sucky situation.
So, I managed to find what I think is the original study from which this video came and I’m skeptical that it’s strong evidence for chimps’ working memory exceeding humans’. It does seem like decent evidence for chimp response time being better.
First of all, they picked the best two chimps to compare against humans:
Second, if I’m reading it correctly, the chimps got more trials in the experiment and had practiced a very similar activity previously.
In other words, the chimps had been practicing a less time-restricted form of the memory activity for years (?) before participating in the experiment. While it’s possible that practice wouldn’t have improved the human scores. that goes against my prior based on the fact that humans can dramatically improve at similar activities such as n-back.
Third, the humans actually did better than one of the two (best performing) monkeys, Ai, and did nearly as well as the best monkey, Ayumu, on the longest hold duration task.
From my perspective, this provides evidence that slower human response time may have played a role in the worse performance in the shorter hold tasks. The authors even mention that the shortest duration is “is close to the frequency of occurrence of human saccadic eye movement”, meaning that a human would only get a flash of the image before it disappeared.
Hmmm interesting, thanks for posting this! Overall the fact that humans are so much smarter than chimps but still have the same-size tiny-on-any-absolute-scale symbolic working memory seems to support my original claim that this is a tragically sucky situation.
Totally agree!