what? chimps destroy humans at remembering sequences of numbers
They are different tests, though. You don’t need sequential memory to win that test, you just need near photographic recall and the general knowledge of numerical order.
oh yeah it's way less impressive if chimps just have near photographic recall and general knowledge of numeric order
> We do not focus on how animals represent single stimuli, or many stimuli that are presented simultaneously. For these reasons, test paradigms that involve simultaneously presented arrays of stimuli are beyond the scope of this study [39, 40], as responding to simultaneous input does not require the recognition of temporal stimulus sequences, even if subjects perform behavior sequences in response to complex input [41]. This also applies to the well-known studies where chimpanzees learned to point to the location of up to nine numerals that were presented simultaneously (see [42, 43] for studies on chimpanzees, and [44–46] for further discussion about these results).
Indeed, the videos of chimps casually acing those tests shows that all the numbers are given at once, and only disappear when the 1 is touched -- the test is getting the positions of 2 through 9 in the right order without being able to see them. The authors of the paper seem to argue that this is different from memorizing information that is presented sequentially.
That said, this does feel like an incorrect finding for other reasons. For example, some gulls seem to rely heavily on scents to navigate, learning a route of thousands of kilometers by a sequence of scent landmarks [2]. This information is presented to them in sequence and seems like a counterexample to my layman's eye.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
It is: think about how you would naively work an n-back of randomly ordered symbols. Most people can’t do more than a few n-back.
However if I have photographic recall I can count forwards or backwards trivially. These are very different mental processes.
Great argument, right?
It is a pretty well known phenomenon, it makes sense that someone might not bother linking it.
Though I agree the polite/generous version of this is asking for source rather than just posting "No".