Smarter Than the Average Primate?

In 1948, Alan Turing wrote: "An unwillingness to admit the possibility that mankind can have any rivals in intellectual power occurs as much amongst intellectual people as amongst others: they have more to lose." Accordingly, comprehensive comparisons between the intellectual powers of great apes and humans are rare -- perhaps because we feel safe in assuming that the human intellect is superior to that of other primates. But recent work suggests this assumption may not be entirely sound.

For example, a recent New Scientist article (via NeuroEthics) contains a provocative statement by primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa, who argues that chimps may systematically outperform humans in certain tests of short-term memory. Given a task in which subjects must press stimuli in the order in which they appeared, all of the adult chimps tested have been equal or superior in performance to humans. This trend holds when the comparison is between adult chimps and adult humans, as well as between chimpanzee infants and human infants.

Read full story in Developing Intelligence