Sunday, May 1, 2011

"Monkeys, Too, Can Recollect What They've Seen, Study Suggests" - Science Daily, April 29, 2011.

According a report publish on April 28, 2011, in Current Biology, monkeys are able, just like humans, to recollect memories from the past and put them together to create an image of what something used to look like. Researchers discovered that monkeys are able to recall things , such as simple objects they have seen in the past and even draw an image of them in a touch screen. They say that the memories from humans and monkeys are similar then they knew.

As the researchers say, there is a difference between recognition and recall. To recall an object is to remember what an object looks like and remember it without it being present in the moment, unlike recognition. "Recall is necessary for planning and imagining and can increase the flexibility of navigation, social behavior, and other cognitive skills."

"The ability of monkeys to recall these shapes flexibly suggests that they might be able to recollect other types of information that would be useful to them in the wild," said Benjamin Basile of Emory University. "It's exciting to speculate that they may be able to recollect the appearance of monkeys they know, what favorite foods look like, or the path they would have to take to get to a water source. Maybe it's often just easier to recognize the monkey, the food, or the landmark in front of you. What we do know is that they do seem to have the ability to recall information in the lab."

Though recall and recognition tests give to humans showed that humans use different types of memory than primates, scientists had to create different tests for primates also because primates cannot draw or talk. One of the tests created for monkeys by Basile and Robert Hampton consisted of five trained rhesus monkeys in a recall test who had to, in a touch screen, produce an image of a simple object just from their memory. Those objects included two or three boxes on a grid and then, after a short while, part of the object would appear in a different part of the screen and the monkey would have to draw the part that was missing.

In the same testing conditions, humans and monkeys showed that they do better in recognition tests than in recall tests and that their recalling ability slowly decreased and that the monkeys ability to recollect did not depend on the language and may have been present 30 million years ago in our common ancestor.

"Recollection and familiarity likely evolved because they solved functionally incompatible problems," the researchers wrote. "For example, familiarity does not support detailed memory for context, but it is quick and resistant to distraction. Recollection is slower and more vulnerable to distraction but supports a more detailed and flexible use of memory. Familiarity might better allow rapid responses to foods and predators under distracting conditions, whereas recollection might be necessary to access knowledge of distant food locations or past social interactions for planning future behavior."

I found this article interesting because I have researched about how monkeys and humans share a lot in common and I think it is fascinating. There also some studies that show that monkeys doing the same test as humans about recalling and recognizing objects do better than humans and it was also proven that monkeys have better memory than humans. Monkeys and humans share the same common ancestor about six million years ago and share DNA and monkeys outsmart humans in different tasks such as ones that involve memory. Maybe in the future monkeys and primates will rule the world...

1 comment:

  1. Nice Article....I love that we are starting to understand how we are not so very different from other life and that regardless we are all connected...

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