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Comment by tibbydudeza | Hacker News Reader

Compared to chimps our short term memory is crap.

Watched a video of a Japanese researcher showing a video picture of symbols to a chimp which then faded away within a few seconds.

I then got a food treat if it could recall the pattern on the touch screen - on the more difficult levels it had to also remember the sequence of the patterns as well.

Chimps always won against a human.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKvX9PPmI-Q

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Did the humans train the same amount as the chimps?

Take chess grandmasters, for a counterexample. Their memory of chess positions and speed of processing them is incredible. Here's an example of puzzle rush, where the puzzles get progressively harder: https://youtu.be/B2ywPhNygM8?t=370

The chimps don’t have jobs that tax mind and attention!

Don't confuse the long term memory which is essentially unlimited (chess example) and the working memory (3-4 items random or ~7 with on-the-fly chunking)

I bet humans would perform just as well if not better if you put them in a box with nothing else to learn than playing that game.

I wonder if chimps are also less butthurt than humans.

That's incredible. I'm particularly blown away by the memorization from a 200 ms observation, and the fine motor skills -- so effortlessly precise with that finger.

That’s incredible, thanks for sharing! I am confident that a person can do what the chimp was doing in the 210ms exposure and recall exercise. I’m about 70% confident I could do that task right now, and sure I would get better with practice.

Someone wanna slap that game together and share the link? It would be fun to self test what the chimp was doing. Still though, really amazing to see how similar we are to them.

There you go: https://vbsd.github.io/chimp-game/

In medium mode, the numbers are hidden only after you click on 1. In hard mode, the numbers are flashed for 210ms. I couldn't succeed with that one, not even close.

The game is very rough and not mobile-friendly though, sorry. I know nothing about front-end development and my interest quickly waned.

Maybe that's the difference: human beings think abstractly and chimps don't? So we remember the abstract, but they simply retain images?

If you think about it, there's nothing especially mysterious about good memory per se if we view it as something like writing things down or a recording. You have to put effort into destroying the memory. Degradation is comparatively slow. So to judge how good (or conversely, bad) memory is, you have to determine what the goal is and the "architecture" implementing it. Recalling recent images that are destroyed shortly after being recorded vs. a mind map of conceptual relations, for example.

Couldn't it be that our memory adapted in the sense that we don't really need short term memory as much as our ancestors did?

Yea, but if I remember correctly its because we are using those brain regions for language processing.

In other words, we can remember those symbols, but only if they make sense in the form of a sentence.

There is a special link between language and memory for sure, evident, if not else, at least by our almost complete lack of memories about our years before language acquisition.

It is called infantile amnesia - our brain only figures out declarative memory storage by the age of 2 to 4 - some argue that is not linked to language as animals also experience this.

Cool, I didn't know that, if it happens in animals it probably has nothing to do with language.

They reckon it is an evolutionary tradeoff - a chimp has to make rapid and complex decisions within a short time frame in the very competitive social hierarchy of a troop.

We are more on collaborating and thus evolved language.

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