Louise hadn’t seen Loretta in at least 26 years. But when a photo of her sister flashed before her, she seemed drawn to the image. This recognition of a family member might seem unremarkable, but Louise is a bonobo, and her apparent ability to reach into memory and direct attention to Loretta could be evidence of the “longest-lasting nonhuman social memory” on the scientific record. Louise participated in an experiment that tested the social memory of bonobos (Pan paniscus) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) based on how much attention they paid to photos of social mates and kin versus images of strangers. It suggested the great apes seem to remember their friends and family even after years apart. “It’s not surprising that they remember others for years. What was surprising is how long their memory seems to last,” Laura Simone Lewis, lead author of a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, told Mongabay. Lewis’s curiosity about great apes’ ability to recall known individuals stemmed from her own experience studying them and accounts from other great ape researchers. Their subjects appeared to recognize them even after gaps of months, sometimes years, said Lewis, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University at the time of the study, and now with the University of California, Berkeley. The ability to remember other individuals isn’t unique to humans. Scientists have shown that dolphins can identify other dolphins’ vocal signatures even after 20 years of separation. This research in cetaceans provided proof…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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