Remembering the order of information is central for a person when participating in conversations, planning everyday life, or undergoing an education. A new study, published in the journal, shows that this ability is probably human unique. Even the closest relatives of humans, such as bonobos, do not learn order in the same way.
Earlier research at Stockholm University has suggested that only humans have the ability to recognize and remember so-called sequential information, and that this ability is a fundamental building block underlying unique human cultural abilities. But previously, this sequence memory-hypothesis has not been tested in humans' closest relatives, the great apes. The new experiments show that bonobos, one of the great apes, struggle to learn the order of stimuli.
"We have previously analyzed a large number of studies that suggest that only humans recognize and remember sequential information faithfully. But, even though we analyzed data from a number of mammals and birds, including monkeys, there has been a lack of information from our closest relatives, the other great apes," says Johan Lind.
"The study shows that bonobos forget that they have seen a blue square already five to 10 seconds after it has disappeared from the screen, and that they have great difficulty learning to distinguish the sequences blue-square-before-yellow-square from yellow-square- before-blue-square, even though they have been trained for thousands of trials," says Vera Vinken, associated with Stockholm University, now a Ph.D.