Chimps and students, equally good at mental maths

Chimps performed about as well as college students at mental addition, US researchers said in a finding that suggests non-verbal maths skills are not unique to humans.

The research from Duke University follows the finding by Japanese researchers earlier that young chimpanzees performed better than human adults at a memory game. Prior studies have found non-human primates can match numbers of objects, compare numbers and choose the larger number of two sets of objects.

"This is the first study that looked at whether or not they could make explicit (plainly stated) decisions that were based on mathematical types of calculations", said Jessica Cantlon, a cognitive (related to knowledge) neuroscience researcher at Duke, whose work appeared in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Biology.

"It shows when you take language away from a human, they end up looking just like monkeys in terms of their performance", Cantlon said.

Her study pitted(set against each other) the ape math team of Boxer and Feinstein - two female chimps named for US senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California - with 14 Duke University students.

The task was to mentally add two sets of dots that were briefly flashed on a computer screen. The teams were asked to pick the correct answer from two choices on a different screen.

The humans were not allowed to count or verbalise as they worked, and they were told to answer as quickly as possible.

Both chimps and humans typically answered within one second. And both groups fared about the same. "I think of this more as using non-human primates as a tool for discovering where the sophisticated (advanced) human mind comes from", she said.

The researchers said the findings shed light on the shared mathematical abilities in humans and non-human primates and shows the importance of language - which allows for counting and more advanced calculations - in the evolution of maths in humans.

Reuters