The "chimp test" is a working-memory challenge: numbers appear on the screen at random spots, then vanish, and you tap the positions in order from memory. It became famous because of a series of experiments with chimpanzees — and, memorably, because one young chimp turned out to be startlingly good at it.
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The research comes from the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University, where chimpanzees learned to use touchscreens. The best-known result was published by Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa in Current Biology in 2007 (volume 17, issue 23, pages R1004–R1005).
In the task, a set of numerals from 1 to 9 appeared at random positions on the screen. As soon as the chimpanzee touched the first number, the rest were instantly covered by identical white squares. To succeed, the animal had to remember where each numeral had been and touch the squares in ascending order — from memory, after only a brief glimpse.
The striking result was about speed. A young chimpanzee named Ayumu could recall the layout of five numerals shown for just 210 milliseconds with roughly 79% accuracy. Crucially, his performance barely dropped as the display time shrank from 650 to 430 to 210 ms — whereas the human adults (and Ayumu's mother, Ai) got steadily worse at the shorter times. At 430 ms and 210 ms, Ayumu significantly outperformed the humans tested. It looked a lot like the "photographic" glance some young children are said to have.
Here's the part the viral headlines usually leave out. In 2009, Alan Silberberg and David Kearns pointed out a serious flaw: Ayumu had extensive practice on the task, while the humans he was compared to had none. So they trained themselves on the exact same test. After roughly 2,500 practice trials, two humans matched Ayumu's accuracy on the five-numeral, 210 ms task (Silberberg & Kearns, Animal Cognition, 2009). A later study trained students to a level even above the chimpanzee. In other words, much of the famous gap came down to unequal practice, not a fixed species difference.
It's easy to read the headline as "chimps are smarter than people." The evidence doesn't support that. What's real is narrower: on a very fast, very specific spatial-memory task, a well-trained young chimpanzee performed impressively — and untrained humans, unsurprisingly, did not. Across the broad range of cognition — language, reasoning, planning, culture — people remain far ahead. Matsuzawa did offer an interesting idea worth flagging as a hypothesis rather than fact: that our strong semantic links to numbers might be an extra load on human working memory. The honest takeaway is a good one all the same: "intelligence" isn't a single ladder everyone climbs in the same order.
TAPSIXTY's chimp test is a simplified, browser-friendly take on the same idea. Numbers appear in a grid; after your first tap, the rest hide, and you continue in order. Clear a round and the next one adds another number, so the sequence keeps growing until you slip. Your score is how far you got — the length of the longest sequence you held in mind.
Most people comfortably manage the shorter sequences and start to feel the strain as the count climbs — that's your working memory hitting its natural limit. Classic estimates of that limit range from George Miller's famous "seven, plus or minus two" (1956) to Nelson Cowan's later argument that the real capacity for this kind of information is closer to about four items (2001). Reaching the higher rounds consistently is genuinely good — and, as the research above shows, practice really does move the needle.
🐵 Take the 60-second chimp test →
A working-memory task inspired by Kyoto University research: numbers flash at random positions, then hide, and you tap them in order from memory. It measures spatial working memory, not IQ.
It's contested. Ayumu beat untrained humans on the fast 210 ms task (~79% accuracy), but a 2009 follow-up showed that after ~2,500 practice trials humans matched him — much of the gap was unequal practice.
A chimpanzee in numerical-memory research at Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute, working with Tetsuro Matsuzawa; the famous paper was Inoue & Matsuzawa, Current Biology, 2007, 17(23):R1004–R1005.
Glance at the whole grid at once, group positions into clusters, freeze a mental snapshot — and practise, which is directly shown to help.
Sources. Inoue, S. & Matsuzawa, T. (2007), "Working memory of numerals in chimpanzees," Current Biology, 17(23), R1004–R1005. Silberberg, A. & Kearns, D. (2009), "Memory for the order of briefly presented numerals in humans as a function of practice," Animal Cognition, 12(2), 405–407. Miller, G. A. (1956), "The magical number seven, plus or minus two," Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97. Cowan, N. (2001), "The magical number 4 in short-term memory," Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87–114.