There’s a reason why telling your dog off for bad behaviour doesn’t always work.
Compared to humans, animals don’t remember specific events, but instead tend to retain useful information that could help them survive.
Dogs forget an event within two minutes, while chimpanzees will forget at around 20 seconds.
Baboons, pig-tailed macaques, and squirrel monkeys, meanwhile, have memories just slightly higher than bee.
This is according to a new study which looked at 25 species, ranging from pigeons to dolphins, and found that an average short-term memory span of animals was 27 seconds.
‘When it comes to short-term memory, it seems to work almost the same for all animals,’ said Johan Lind, associate Professor of ethology at Stockholm University.
‘It’s a bit surprising that apes do not remember better than rats, but the results are clear.
‘Human memory stands out because it is so susceptible; anything seems to stick in the memory for a very long time.’
The experiments began with an animal seeing a stimulus, such as a red dot.
The red dot disappears, and after some time the animal may see two stimuli, one of which is the same as the first, while the other is different, for example a black square.
The animal is rewarded if it chooses the same stimulus after the break as it saw before the break, in this case the red dot.
The study shows that animals have different memory systems divided into short term memory and specialised memories.
In short-term memory, creatures store information about almost anything but the information disappears quickly.
Animals also have a variety of specialised memories that, on the one hand, can only store a certain type of information, but on the other, the information is stored for a very long time.
For instance, a hoarding crow remembers the location of the hidden nuts for months, but the same bird has trouble remembering other things in other contexts for even a minute.
‘This seems to apply to all animals except man,’ says Magnus Enqvist, Professor of Ethology at Stockholm University.
Since chimps are our closest living relatives, Professor Lind told National Geographic he was surprised by their poor performance.
It suggests human capacity for memory evolved after we branched from the most recent shared ancestor with chimps, over six million years ago, he added.
Sometime in our prehistory, we developed mental abilities that enabled people to speak, learn to read and build complex societies.
‘Our study helps to better understand how human psychology changed over the past millions of years,’ says Stefano Ghirlanda, a professor of psychology at Brooklyn College.