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A chimpanzee's advantage in a particular memory game

Numbers flash on a screen and are replaced by blank squares. Can you touch their remembered locations in order? A trained chimpanzee made this task famous, but exposure time and experience matter. A later study with two humans found that practice changed the comparison, limiting claims about overall intelligence.

5–7 min

Questions you could explore

  • What would count as a fair comparison when the participants arrive with different training histories?
  • What features of a flashing-number task make its result different from a test of general intelligence?

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