Visuospatial Working Memory of Bilinguals, Monolinguals, and Chimpanzees

The recent Cognitive Trade-Off hypothesis claims that chimpanzees are superior in their visuospatial serial order recall because, unlike humans, they did not have to sacrifice some of their cognitive abilities to accommodate the complex system of language. We investigated such claim by comparing humans and chimpanzees (from another study) as well as compared bilinguals to monolinguals based on the popular Bilingual Executive Advantage hypothesis. Participants (like chimpanzees) engaged in a limited-hold masking task in which characters (numerals or nonverbal pictures) were briefly displayed on screen before being masked by white boxes. Participants then had to tap on the masked characters’ location in the order which they first appeared. Findings revealed that chimpanzees clearly outperform humans in the Arabic numerals task, human capacity is limited but is dependent on latency time; and language’s influence is dependent on mode of presentation of serial order and subject to language group differences.