Some Alberta high school students took a test that compared their working memory to those of some very bright chimpanzees.
At Holy Trinity Academy in Okotoks, south of Calgary, 42 students participated in the Chimp Test through the school’s Science Research Club.
The test is designed to assess working memory, which stores small bits of information for a short timeframe that will be used in the immediate future.
Students who took the test had an average score of 9.57, beating the average chimpanzee score of nine.
For the online test, numbers appear in random positions onscreen that need to be selected in the correct order.
Once the test is started, the numbers disappear, and more numbers are added to increase difficulty as the test progresses.
The test is not entirely scientific, but teacher Paula Paulgaard said it got the whole school population talking.
“As a class, we try to come up with ideas that will encourage student engagement and spark scientific-based conversations,” Paulgaard said.
The entertaining and educational test is based on a memory test given to Ayumu and several other chimpanzees from Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute in Japan.
After the chimps learned numbers and their order, researchers developed the test to check the animals' memory.
Only a few highly trained chimpanzees were used in the study, and they scored a nine about 90 per cent of the time.
Comparisons between the chimpanzees and university students found similar levels of accuracy between the two groups, but found the chimpanzees could memorize numbers more quickly.
Take the Chimp Test by visiting iqtests.org/other-tests/chimp-test.