Numbers 1–N appear on screen. Memorize their positions, then click them in order from 1 upward. After your first click, the numbers hide. Chimpanzees are surprisingly good at this!
This test is based on research by Tetsuro Matsuzawa at Kyoto University, who found that young chimpanzees outperform adult humans on this exact task. Chimps evolved exceptional short-term photographic memory for their survival needs.
It tests your visuospatial working memory and attentional control simultaneously. Try also the Visual Memory Test and Number Memory Test to build a complete memory profile.
The Chimp Test is based on pioneering research by primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University. In 2007, Matsuzawa and colleagues demonstrated that young chimpanzees — specifically a chimpanzee named Ayumu — could outperform human university students on this exact task: memorizing the positions of numbers that vanished after a brief exposure, then touching them in ascending order.
Chimps consistently achieve higher accuracy at shorter exposure times, suggesting they possess eidetic-like short-term photographic memory that humans largely lack. The likely evolutionary explanation is that chimpanzees in the wild benefit enormously from instantly remembering the spatial locations of food, predators, and group members in a complex 3D environment. Humans, by contrast, may have traded some of this raw spatial memory capacity for enhanced language processing — a fundamentally different cognitive trade-off.
For humans, the Chimp Test simultaneously measures visuospatial working memory, attentional control, and inhibitory processing — because you must suppress the natural tendency to look at the numbers in order and instead hold a spatial map of their positions. The key challenge is the masking step: after your first click, all remaining numbers disappear, forcing pure spatial memory recall for subsequent taps.
Average human performance is 5–7 numbers before an error. Scores above 9 place you in chimp-comparable territory. Unlike many cognitive tests, performance on the Chimp Test improves significantly with practice — suggesting that humans can recruit additional spatial encoding strategies when motivated. Compare with the Visual Memory Test and Corsi Block Test for related spatial memory benchmarks.