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Chimps probably can't remember where they left their keys either

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International researchers say that our genetic cousins, the chimpanzees, have a similar working memory to us - the kind of memory we use to add up the cost of our shopping, or remember the names of people at a dinner party. The team offered a bunch of zoo-based apes food in one of four different boxes, and once a single box was opened, they shuffled them around. The best performing apes could remember around four items, the scientists say, and like us, would start to fail if distracted with a second set of tasks.

Journal/conference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Link to research (DOI): 10.1098/rspb.2019.0715

Organisation/s: University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Austria

Funder: This project has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 639072).

Media Release

From: The Royal Society

Chimpanzees flexibly update working memory contents and show susceptibility to distraction in the self-ordered search task

In humans, working memory is central to our mental lives, for instance, we use it when we add up the cost of our shopping. Some argue it is particularly developed in our species, but how do chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives, compare? We tasked chimpanzees with keeping in mind which boxes they had already searched for food, sometimes shuffling their locations between searches. We found key similarities with human working memory: the best-performing individuals remembered at least 4 items, and if they had to perform a similar task in parallel (searching a second set of boxes), their performance declined.

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