Introduction: 1 Humans and chimpanzees have both descended from a common ancestor 6-7 million years ago. As humans gradually evolved from chimpanzees, and genetic changes came about, behavior and physical characteristics changed as well. By studying …show more content…
A controversial study conducted by Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa has shown that young chimpanzee have high capabilities in remembering numerical components. Three mothers and their 4 year old offspring were used in this experiment. Using a touch screen monitor connected to a computer, they were taught arabic numerals from 1-9. Unique trials were used with both numbers in order and in adjacent positions. All chimpanzees accomplished the task of touching the numbers in numerical order. When the offspring reached 5 years of age, the chimpanzees had to touch the first number of a numerical sequence, only to then have all other numbers blocked from view by a white box. Their task was to correctly press the white boxes in correct order of their hidden numbers. Everyone succeeded and performance of the children outweighed that of their mothers. A third part of the experiment to test working memory, was conducted on both humans and two of the best performing chimpanzees. After an initial touch to a white circle on the screen, five numbers appeared for various durations ( 650,430 & 210 ms) and disappeared thereafter. Results showed that humans performance declined as the amount of time decreased. One chimpanzee, Ai, showed the same results as humans. However, the other chimpanzee, Ayumu, was consistently accurate, with no …show more content…
From the basis of this botanical map, a virtual map was created that represented all the yielding fruit trees. A simulation was conducted of all the potential strategies that chimpanzees could employ to obtain resources without the use of spatial memory. First, a simulation was done that included different assumptions pertaining to the chimpanzees preferences for specific species of trees. Next, the detection field was varied as a control to adhere to the possibility that the chimpanzees would use their sense of smell to detect fruit trees. Including all of these assumptions, a comparison was conducted to compare the simulated distance traveled, the amount of times each tree had been visited and the rates of revisits to the previous observations done on wild chimpanzees. Results showed that chimpanzees visit rare species often and travel shorter distances to reach them and revisit the same trees more often than a chimpanzee would who had no spatial memory. It was discovered that chimpanzees travel greater distances to reach resources where they can eat for longer periods of time, and revisit those resources more often where they ate for a long period of time in their initial visit. They are fully able to remember the productivity of each tree and use their energy to travel further to reach a high yielding location. (Normand, Ban. et al 2008) Discussion: All three