Young chimps trash college kids in memory test

TOKYO (Reuters Life!) - Think you've got a good memory? Think again: young chimpanzees, the evolutionary distant cousins of humans, have outperformed college students in short-term memory tests, researchers at Japan's Kyoto University said.

Nine university students, three young chimpanzees and the chimps' mothers were tested memorizing the location of numbers on a computer monitor.

In the hardest tests, where numbers are flashed for 0.21 seconds on a screen, the star five-year-old chimp averaged 80 percent accuracy, double that of the university students.

All the young chimpanzees had better numerical recollection than human adults, the researchers said in an article released in the scientific journal "Current Biology", published on Monday.

"A lot of people believe naively that humans are the most intelligent (creatures) on this planet. I think this research has shown very clearly that they have been proven wrong," said Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a professor at the university's Primate Research Institute.

But humans, do not despair -- research also found that the older the chimpanzees got, the worse their memory. Older chimpanzees under-performed human subjects.

(Reporting by Olivier Fabre, writing by Yoko Kubota, editing by Miral Fahmy)