Numbers appear at once, then hide the moment you click the first one. Click them back in order.
A team led by Tetsuro Matsuzawa at Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute ran a working-memory experiment on a chimpanzee named Ayumu. Numbers 1 through 9 briefly appeared on screen, then were covered by white squares — and Ayumu tapped their locations in the correct order, often faster and more accurately than trained human university students, which made headlines at the time.
The experiment is often cited as a striking example of how working memory — the ability to briefly hold and manipulate information you've just seen — can differ between humans and chimpanzees. This kind of momentary memory shows up everywhere in daily life, from mental math to conversation to learning.
On this site's scale, 7–8 digits is average, 10+ is excellent, and 12+ is the top-1% band. Nine — the count Ayumu the chimpanzee handled reliably in the experiment — is our "chimp level" line.
A round only counts when you tap the digits in the correct order, so the record is how many you reproduced in sequence, not how many you saw.
| Numbers remembered | Grade |
|---|---|
| 12+ | Top 1% |
| 10 - 11 | Great |
| 9 | Chimp-level (Ayumu's score) |
| 7 - 8 | Average |
| 6 or fewer | Below average |
To a degree. Rather than memorizing digits one by one, chunking the positions into a single shape or pattern works well, and practicing keeping your gaze on the center while reading the layout with peripheral vision is also reported to help.
That said, Ayumu's performance reflects training from infancy plus species differences, so humans shouldn't expect to match it indefinitely through practice. Much of the gain from repetition is simply getting used to this test.