Chimp Test
This test measures your working memory. Numbers appear on the screen (1, 2, 3, 4, and so on). The moment you tap the first one, the rest are hidden, and you have to recall their order from memory and click them in sequence.
Each cleared round adds one more number. After three mistakes the test ends. Your score is the highest level you complete.
Chimpanzees are known to beat humans at this kind of task. Let's see where you stand.
Get ready...
Your past attempts
What the chimp test measures
The chimp test measures working memory, the mental scratchpad that holds a handful of items in mind for a few seconds while you act on them. Here the items are positions on a grid: you glimpse where the numbers sit, then rebuild that layout from memory and tap them in order. That makes it a test of visuospatial working memory in particular, the visual and spatial side of the scratchpad. The format comes from work at Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute, where Tetsuro Matsuzawa and Sana Inoue ran young chimpanzees through almost the same task. The same ability shows up whenever you hold a short pattern in mind: remembering which row you parked in, retracing a route someone just pointed out, or tracking the pieces on a board. It is a narrow skill, but a real and measurable one.
Why chimpanzees beat humans
One of the most surprising results in comparative psychology is that trained chimpanzees can do this better than adult humans. In Inoue and Matsuzawa's 2007 study, a young chimp named Ayumu held and reproduced numeral sequences faster and more accurately than university students. Remarkably, he kept succeeding even when the numerals flashed for just 210 milliseconds, about the length of a single glance and too brief to move the eyes around the screen, while people struggled. Matsuzawa's explanation is the cognitive trade-off hypothesis: as the human brain specialised in language and abstract reasoning, it may have given up some of this fast, almost photographic visual memory. A chimpanzee in the wild has good reason to keep it. Reading a whole scene at a glance, which tree is fruiting, where a rival just moved, who is nearby, is a survival advantage when you cannot talk it through. Humans lean on words and concepts to carry information instead, which is powerful but slower for a task like this. The two species solved different problems.
What affects your score
Several things move your result. Age is one: this kind of visual working memory tends to peak in youth, roughly the teens to the mid-twenties, then eases off gradually, a pattern seen across memory research. Attention matters just as much in the moment, because the task collapses the instant your focus drifts, so a quiet room and a single honest try beat a distracted one. Practice helps a little, since you can learn to chunk positions into groups and climb a level or two, but your underlying span, the number of items you can juggle at once, stays fairly stable. Cowan (2001) put that core capacity at around four items for most adults, which is why the grid feels manageable until it suddenly does not. Whether heavy phone and screen use changes any of this is still debated, with no clear verdict either way.
What your score means
The test starts at four squares and adds one each time you clear a board, ending after three mistakes. Read the bands below as a rough guide, not a clinical scale:
- Level 4 or below is a low result here, and usually a sign of distraction, fatigue, or a misread first board rather than poor memory. A calm retry often jumps several levels.
- Level 5 to 7 is the typical range for a healthy adult, with level 6 sitting right at the median where most people land.
- Level 8 to 10 is a strong result, roughly the top fifth of players, showing an above-average visual span.
- Level 11 and up is exceptional, the kind of capacity that starts to approach what trained chimpanzees reach on this task.
Your percentile is read off aggregated results from this web-based test, and one run is only a snapshot. Mood, sleep, and attention all nudge it, so treat a single score as a measure of this attempt rather than a fixed ceiling on your memory. Running it a few times and keeping your best honest result, rather than your first cold try, gives a truer picture of where you stand.
Questions
Is this test really about my intelligence?
Loosely. Working memory, which this test taps, is one of the better single predictors of reasoning ability, and the two move together across large studies. But correlation is not identity: this is one narrow visual task scored in seconds, and it leaves out language, knowledge, and most of what makes up intelligence. A high score is a fast visual memory, nothing more, and a low one on a tired afternoon says very little about you.
How does the score change with age?
Visual working memory tends to be sharpest from the teens into the mid-twenties, then declines slowly and steadily through adulthood. The drop is gradual and easy to offset on any given day with rest and focus, so an alert older adult can still beat a distracted twenty-year-old. Children under about ten usually score lower simply because this kind of span is still developing.
Does practice help?
A little. With repetition you learn tricks like grouping nearby squares into a single chunk, which can lift you a level or two and settle the nerves on the first board. Beyond that your core span is fairly fixed, so the gains plateau quickly. Practising the test mostly makes you better at the test, not at memory in general.
What is the chimpanzee average?
Trained chimpanzees reach around 9 to 11 items on tasks like this, against roughly 7 to 8 for human adults. Researchers such as Matsuzawa read the gap through the cognitive trade-off hypothesis: humans may have swapped some rapid visual memory for language and abstract thought over the course of evolution. So losing to a chimp here is expected, not a personal failing.
Does my device change the result?
Only a little. A phone touchscreen and a desktop mouse both register a tap quickly enough that the small input difference barely matters for a memory task with no time pressure on the tap itself. What matters far more is your setting: a calm, quiet space with no notifications will move your score more than any choice of hardware.
How can I improve my working memory?
Honestly, lasting gains are hard. Good sleep, regular exercise, and managing stress all keep your existing memory working at its best, which is the reliable part. Brain-training drills like dual-n-back are popular and may help on the trained task, but whether they carry over to everyday memory is genuinely debated, with mixed evidence. Treat bold improvement claims with caution.