Posted Dec 21, 2007 at 01:32PM by Isaac C. Listed in: Animals and Wildlife, Mathematics, Psychology Tags: Duke University, rhesus macaque
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Monkeys are smart - Image 1


So you think you're smarter than a monkey? A new study from PLoS Biology suggests that monkeys can do math just as well as humans. In fact, it suggests that without language, it's hard to tell the difference on the performances between monkeys and humans.

One study showed that rhesus macaque monkeys performed nearly as well as college students with quick mental math. When asked simple math problems, college students answered correctly 94% of the time while monkeys answered correctly 76% of the time.

It was also found the the humans and the monkeys had similar performances when it came to answering: when answers from two choice boxes were similar in number, both monkeys and humans "took longer to answer and had more errors."

As if that wasn't enough to prove the intelligence of monkeys, another study from Duke University found that chimpanzees actually did better than humans at a memory game.

Jessica Cantolon, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at Duke and whose research was part of the study, explains that:

This is the first study that looked at whether or not they could make explicit decisions that were based on mathematical types of calculations. [...] It shows when you take language away from a human, they end up looking just like monkeys in terms of their performance.


The study concludes that language is an important part of what makes us different from monkeys. Wonder if a barrel of monkeys would still be as fun if they could do math homework.


[Via PLoS Biology] Permalink  |   Email this  |   Linking Blogs   |   Digg It!

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4 Comments


Sort by:
   by jarret - 2007-12-21
 » we already know this

chris rock can even act. a little


   Re: Advertising -


   Re: muramasa655 - 2007-12-22
 » ...

I'm not trying to be politically correct, but that's really not funny...
   by ShadeyProphet - 2007-12-21
 » So what does this tell us?

we should all eat more bananas maybe?

   by jarret - 2007-12-22
 » Politically correct

To the idiot that thinks that its not funny, you must be the one they challenged the monkey against. Only a monkey would watch chris rock and think that his cruel, racist jokes are funny, and only a bigger idiot would compare an animal to any HUMAN!



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