This just in: chimps are now smarter than toddlers! Well, okay, maybe not 100 percent true, but in a study, Panzee, a 22 year old female chimp, recently outperformed 12 children and 4 adults in a virtual reality computer game that consisted of a complex maze.
The study was published in the American Journal of Primatology and has exceptionally good methodology to suggest that chimps might be even smarter than we originally thought they were. Their intelligence level could easily be identical or even better than that of a young child.
When the games got progressively more complex, some of the humans would ask for hints or help from the testing aids. They were denied this assistance stating that quite simply, due to language barriers, there was no way they could help the chimpanzee friends in addition to the humans.
This is likely the primary reason why most people do not recognize the intelligence level of chimps as much as could be under different circumstances. Even though a chimp’s brain is almost identical to a human brain in many ways, the lack of functional language gives them a difficult standing in human society. If chimps were able to speak, they might be able to communicate and function in almost an identical manner to a human being.
The humans and chimps were split evenly in terms of gender, half male and half female. The humans were primarily British and the chimps were from the Research Center at the University of Georgia. All of them, both human and animal, volunteered for this experiment.
The humans, who were unfamiliar with the game’s workings, were given 10 to 20 practice sessions in order to familiarize themselves with the game’s workings so they could be on an even level with the chimps. The chimps had already used these computers in much more tests and would have had a clear advantage had the humans at least had some time to practice.
While this is still a pretty significant gap, if a chimp can outperform a human on any cognitive level, it shows a much greater amount of intelligence in these animals than anyone had originally anticipated.
The most notable test subject, named Panzee, was found to be the most efficient at the maze overall. She used the least amount of movement to get to her destination, though a couple of adult humans arrived there before she did. This means her cognitive understanding of the movement, though a little slower, was better and more well rounded than any of the humans in the test. Bravo Panzee!
https://www.insidescience.org/news/chimpanzees-can-play-video-games-better-kindergartners
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/chimps-happy-to-take-turns-playing-video-games
