Monkeys match humans in arithmetic tests

[b]Monkeys match humans in arithmetic tests[/b]

Monkeys have shown they are almost as good as college students when it comes to simple arithmetic, according to a study demonstrating that a monkey's ability to perform mental addition can rival that of people.

The test was carried out on two female rhesus macaques, called Boxer and Feinstein, who were pitched against 14 American college students with an average age of 23. Both groups carried out the same tasks of mental addition and the results almost ended in an embarrassing draw.

The test consisted of choosing the correct sum of dots shown on two consecutive computer screens. A third screen showed two boxes, one with the correct number of dots formed from adding the two previous computer screens, and another box alongside it with an incorrect number of dots. ...

read more: http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3260710.ece

Well good. Maybe we can elect some of them to balance the budget in congress.

this makes sense to me. last year i had a monkey do my taxes and got a much bigger refund than in previous years when i did them myself.

on a more serious note, i wonder if these monkeys were domesticated (for how many generations?) or recently from the wild. captive monkeys would learn much from interacting with humans over time.

bub