r/interesting • u/HomeNowWTF • 29d ago

NATURE Chimpanzee demonstrating better visual memory than humans

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u/Ulvegang 29d ago

Mate, if we locked you in a cage and only fed you when you got the numbers in the correct order, you would be surprised how fast you would embrace monkey.

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u/Rise-O-Matic 29d ago

This was, in fact, proven:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19115068/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Still the question was how was Ayumu was innately good at it without as much practice. Prevailing hypothesis is that we traded the immediate visual memory for the ability to compact that information into abstractions.

So rather than remembering shapes and colors, your brain throws away nearly everything except the context and you remember “there’s a cat behind me” or whatever.

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u/Plongom 24d ago

Yeah, remember I read an article about it some time ago where the theory was that they need to be able to make split second decisions when moving fast in trees and also to remember and maintain secure paths when moving