The chimps that beat humans in a memory test

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But scientists claim to have proved that chimpanzees are brighter in some departments.

Research suggests that young chimps are blessed with photographic memories, allowing them to remember patterns and sequences with amazing accuracy.

As a result, they often outdo their human cousins at memory games, completing them more quickly and with fewer mistakes.

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Five-year-old Ayumu gets to grips with the test

One of the chimps studied, a five-year-old male called Ayumu, did twice as well as men and women at the task, which involved memorising the position of numbers flashed up on a screen.

Researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa said: "There are still many people, including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions.

"No one can imagine that chimpanzees - young chimpanzees at the age of five - have a better performance in a memory task than humans.

"Here we show for the first time that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection - better than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus following the same procedure."

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Researchers say the tests show the chimps' ability is similar to our own photographic memories

The researchers, from Kyoto University in Japan, pitted six chimps - three mother and child pairs - against a group of university students.

The chimps had already been trained to recognise the numbers from one to nine and place them in sequence.

In tests involving flashing numbers on a screen, then covering them in white squares, the chimps were faster at pointing out which number had been where.

The researchers now plan to see how the young chimps fare against children.