This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
We humans aren't used to having our intelligence challenged. Among the animal kingdom, we hold no records for speed, strength or size but our vaunted mental abilities are unparalleled. But research from Kyoto University shows that some chimps have a photographic memory that puts humans to shame.
In 2007, Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa found that young chimps have an ability to memorise details of complex images that is literally super-human. Boffin chimp Ayumu, outperformed university students in memory tasks where they had to rapidly memorise numbers scattered on a touchscreen and press them in numerical order.
This is the first time that an animal has outmatched humans in a mental skill. Recently, I've previously blogged about animals that show abilities once considered to be uniquely human, including jays that can plan for the future, rats ...
