Paris, Nov 07: Pigeons and baboons have a remarkably good long-term memory, according to a study by French and US animal behaviourists.
Joel Fagot of France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Marseille and Robert Cook of Tufts University, Massachusetts, recruited both species in an innovative test into picture recall.
Two male 18-year-old baboons and two Silver King pigeons were placed in front of computers and were shown pictures. They had to peck -- in the case of the monkeys, using a joystick -- a cross or a circle to show whether or not they had seen the image before.
Over five years, birds Linus and BF memorised 800 to 1,200 different pictures before reaching their limit. The baboons, more prosaically called No. 3 and No. 9, had memorised 3,500 to 5,000 pictures and had not yet reached a limit by the end of the study.
The two species demonstrated similar memory-loss rates and reaction times and only differed in their memory capacity, according to the paper, which appears in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
"We can infer that the baboons performed below their real capability level, given that they achieved an 80-percent accuracy rate after the learning period," Fagot said in an interview with a news agency.
Memory capacity was probably shaped powerfully by evolution and was probably key to the rise of intelligence in humans, the authors suggest.
Bureau Report
