Gene Kang, Period 5

This video shows the remarkable memory of a chimpanzee. The chimpanzee participates in a game in which, after a random series of numbers are shown and then immediately concealed by identical blocks, it must correctly tap the cubes in chronological order. After watching the video, you'll quickly realize that the chimpanzee is definitely not using maintenance rehearsal, because there is hardly enough time for all the cubes to enter one's sensory memory and become encoded for storage, let alone repeat them in one's mind. Rather, the chimpanzee is most likely using elaborative rehearsal by making connections between the new information and the old information already stored in long term memory. Speaking of long term memory, another explanation to this incredible feat is the possibility that the chimpanzee may have just memorized the visual appearance of a specific number of "random" series via visual encoding, and the required hand movements that follow. You could argue that this could be short term memory, for a human being could easily learn the procedure in an hour give or take, but you must acknowledge the greatly inferior mental capacity of a chimpanzee, or any non-human animal for that matter, and thus, something that takes an hour for a human to learn may take months, if not years, for an animal. If this was the case, then the experimenters most likely used operant conditioning, specifically shaping, in order to get the chimpanzee to do what it has done in the video.