Can a chimpanzee beat you at memory?

The Kyoto study

Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa, from Kyoto University, trained young chimpanzees to touch Arabic numerals in ascending order on a touchscreen (Inoue and Matsuzawa, 2007). In the hardest version, numerals from 1 to 9 appeared at random positions, then were covered with white squares after the first touch, or after a fixed short time.

The headline result came from Ayumu, a juvenile chimpanzee. With five numerals shown for only 210 ms before being masked, he recalled their positions in the right order with an accuracy of about 79%, and none of the nine humans tested approached that level (Silberberg and Kearns, 2009).

The answer from Silberberg and Kearns

Silberberg and Kearns pointed out a large difference between the groups. Ayumu had many sessions of practice on the task before his final performance was measured, the humans had none (Silberberg and Kearns, 2009).

They gave two people practice on the same task. With practice, their accuracy matched Ayumu’s (Silberberg and Kearns, 2009). The gap between the species shrank to a gap between trained and untrained players.

What the online chimp test keeps, and what it changes

The online chimp test, and Constellation in Headgame, keep the idea. Numbers scattered on a grid, hidden as soon as you touch the first one, then tapped in order from memory. They change the timing. You look as long as you want before the first touch, so it is no longer a test of a 210 ms glimpse. It becomes a test of how many positions you can hold in order.

That also changes the scores. Across 27,233 Human Benchmark games, the median is 10 numbers (Human Benchmark, 2026), far more than the five numerals of the brief task.

So, who wins?

On one very brief task, a trained chimpanzee beat untrained humans, and trained humans caught up. Neither study says chimpanzees have a better memory in general. They say that practice matters a lot, and that one task is not memory as a whole.

Sources

1. Inoue S., Matsuzawa T. (2007). Working memory of numerals in chimpanzees. Current Biology 17(23), R1004 to R1005. doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2007.10.027
2. Silberberg A., Kearns D. (2009). Memory for the order of briefly presented numerals in humans as a function of practice. Animal Cognition 12, 405 to 407. doi.org/10.1007/s10071-008-0206-8
3. Human Benchmark, score distributions embedded in humanbenchmark.com, read on 13 October 2026. Reaction time n 70 940, sequence memory n 35 868, chimp test n 27 233, number memory n 24 084. humanbenchmark.com