Chimpanzees and orangutans elephant memory - The Mundo.es

The line that separates man from ape is increasingly blurred. The brains of people and the relationship established with their memories still keeps many secrets, but also a challenge facing the great apes, who are attributed capabilities hitherto considered uniquely human .

An experiment conducted by scientists at the University of Aarhus in Denmark with chimpanzees and orangutans just checked that these primates also retain autobiographical memories . This study has produced evidence that their long-term memory allows recall events that have already lived.

To develop the experiment, the primates should perform a task that had taken place only four times three years ago . They had several pieces in a box and a banana that was out of reach, in another room. They should use the right tool to reach the banana. This is the same action that developed three years ago and now have run again.

Other evidence

entrusted a task they had performed only once in her life, two weeks earlier.

In both studies, chimpanzees and orangutans were able to remember where they were the tools necessary to perform the task, and pick them fulfill their missions without any problem . Spanish For Gema Martin-Ordas, project manager, “not only surprised that they remembered the event held to three years, but also took him out very quickly.”

“This is an important finding because it implies that primates were able to establish a relationship between the experimenter, the task and the spatial context to remember a past event that was very similar. This idea of ??’linking’ is a crucial component of autobiographical memories, “says Martin-Ordas.

a complex mental process

Autobiographical memory is a complex mental process. As primatologist explains Pablo Herreros, “ autobiographical memory requires a higher level of consciousness than others because is mentally evoke multiple aspects of events experienced in the past to establish links between them and use them in the this. “

In large part, we know that humans have autobiographical memory because we can express through speech. The language barrier makes it very difficult to study this type of memory in other organisms.

The importance of this discovery lies, says Herreros, that “the results of the experiment are further evidence that other great apes, and the human mind can retrieve information on past experiences to use in this even when those have happened years ago, something that has been denied until recently by the skeptics “.

This discovery opens the door to an entire field of research, to understand how far the memory abilities of primates. Gema Martin-Ordas For the next step you can zoom further ape to human being will “know what they remember primate social relationships “.