Are your baby smarter than Chimps?

Do not worry, Your baby is smarter than the smartest chimps in the world according to the new study below.

Babies Vs. Chimps: Who’s Smarter? – TIME

A new study, published Thursday in Science, makes a strong case that the second theory is the right one. A team of anthropologists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, developed a battery of learning tests they call the Primate Cognition Test Battery, and gave it to 106 chimps, 105 children and 32 orangutans, to compare the groups directly. Says Esther Hermann, a co-author of the paper: “It’s the first time anything like this has been done.”

The three groups performed about equally well on “physical learning” — locating hidden objects, figuring out the source of a noise, understanding the concepts of more and less, using a stick to get something that’s out of reach. And indeed, the kids were of an age — 2 1/2 years old — where it’s widely known that they do perform about as well as chimps in such tests. So for example, the scientists would hide a treat of some kind — a toy, or some food — behind a box, while the test subjects looked on. The kids, chimps and orangs would have to be sophisticated enough to know that the object disappearing from view didn’t mean it stopped existing, and had to be able to figure out where it had gone. All three groups did equally well at this sort of thing.

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