That study is extremely interesting, but its central claim is disputed. Here it is claimed that when humans get to practice as much as Ayumu, they can reach his level:
Do chimpanzees have better spatial working memory than humans? In a previous report, a juvenile chimpanzee outperformed 3 university students on memory for briefly displayed digits in a spatial array (Inoue & Matsuzawa, 2007). The authors described these abilities as extraordinary and likened the chimpanzee’s performance to eidetic memory. However, the chimpanzee received extensive practice on a non-time-pressured version of the task; the human subjects received none. Here we report that, after adequate practice, 2 university students substantially outperformed the chimpanzee. There is no evidence for a superior or qualitatively different spatial memory system in chimpanzees.
That study is extremely interesting, but its central claim is disputed. Here it is claimed that when humans get to practice as much as Ayumu, they can reach his level:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h842v2702r60u481/
There was a request for these full texts, so I’m providing them here: Silberberg & Kearns (2009) and Cook & Wilson (2010).
Cook & Wilson’s abstract: