A few weeks ago we launched the QHImp Qhallenge to see if chimpanzees really did have better working memories than humans. The results showed that humans were better than previously thought, but still not up to the level of chimps. Now we’ve extended the QHImp Qhallenge to test Matsuzawa’s theory that semantic links are overloading our working memory and making the task difficult. You can now play the QHImp Qhallenge with letters of the alphabet, novel symbols, shades of colour and directional arrows. We’ll be comparing performance on these tasks to the numeral task to see if fewer semantic links make the task easier.
The QHImp Qhallenge: Testing the semantic hypothesis
You should be charging people for this expansion pack, Sean.
On the ‘symbol’ run, I didn’t even know what the last two symbols in my game were… I never really saw/learned them (still beat you though). The colours get really hard to tell apart as well.
I did one trial of each and my performance goes Symbol > Colour > Letter, which seems to go in the right order for semantic load. So if N = me, you’re golden!