Chimp Test
The chimp test scatters numbers across a grid and asks you to click them in ascending order — but the moment you click 1, they all vanish and the rest has to come from memory. It starts with four numbers and adds one every time you clear a board.
How to use Chimp Test
- Press Start. Four numbers appear at random positions on the grid.
- Click 1. Every number instantly disappears, leaving blank squares behind.
- Continue clicking in ascending order from memory. Clearing the board adds another number to the next round.
- A wrong square is a strike and the board is redealt at the same size. Three strikes end the run and your score is the largest board you cleared.
About Chimp Test
The chimp test is a spatial working-memory task dressed up as a game. Numbers are scattered across a grid, you are given as long as you like to study them, and then the display is removed the instant you commit — so everything after the first click is drawn from a memory trace that started decaying the moment the numbers disappeared. Difficulty rises on a single axis, the number of items, which makes it a clean threshold measure.
Its fame comes from Inoue and Matsuzawa’s 2007 report in Current Biology, in which the chimpanzee Ayumu outperformed human adults at recalling numeral positions flashed for as little as 210 milliseconds. Later work argued that practice and task familiarity explain much of the gap, and the human participants in the original study were not trained to the same level. What survives the criticism is the general point: a chimpanzee is not merely a worse human at this, and the human strategy of naming what we see is a genuine trade-off rather than a strict upgrade.
For your own score, the useful comparison is between your attempts rather than against a chimpanzee. The number of items you can hold is fairly stable, but the encoding time you allow yourself, the order you rehearse in, and how quickly you execute after the first click all move the result by several levels. Every run is stored on this device, so a week of attempts shows whether you have improved your strategy or simply had a lucky board.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good score on the chimp test?
Most adults stall between 8 and 11 numbers. Reaching 13 is well above average and 15 or more is exceptional. For context, Ayumu the chimpanzee handled nine numerals at a fifth-of-a-second exposure with roughly 80% accuracy — far shorter than the time most people take here.
What is the Ayumu experiment this is based on?
In 2007 Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute reported that young chimpanzees, and Ayumu in particular, could recall the positions of numerals flashed for a fraction of a second more accurately than the human university students tested alongside them. The finding is contested — the humans had less practice, and the exposure conditions favoured rapid spatial capture — but it remains one of the most striking demonstrations of a non-human cognitive advantage.
Why can chimpanzees beat humans at this?
The leading explanation is that young chimpanzees retain a form of eidetic spatial capture that humans largely trade away as language develops. Adults tend to encode the board verbally — "one top-left, two middle" — which is slower and more fragile than taking a snapshot. It is a trade, not a deficit: the same specialisation that costs you here is what lets you read this sentence.
What is the best strategy?
Take in the whole board before touching anything, since the clock only starts when you click 1. Group the numbers into two or three clusters and rehearse them as a route rather than as separate positions. Clicking quickly once you start also helps — the spatial trace decays within a few seconds, so hesitating on number four usually costs you numbers seven and eight.
Does clicking an empty square count against me?
No. Only clicking the wrong number is a strike, so exploring an empty part of the grid is free. This keeps the test focused on memory for the numbers rather than on pointing precision.
Related tools
- Number Memory Test — How many digits can you hold?
- Verbal Memory Test — Seen it before, or is it new?
- Brain Fog Test — Objective Brain Fog Index from 10 timed tasks
- Reaction Time Test — Measure your visual reaction speed
- Sequence Memory Test — Repeat the growing pattern
- Visual Memory Test — Remember the lit squares