Chimpanzees Can Remember Faces for Years, Revealed by Study

Humans have the ability to recognize and remember faces from a very early age. Newborn infants often show a preference for looking at faces. This ability also improves as they grow up. Face recognition is a holistic process. In this, the brain remembers faces as a whole rather than individual features.

Humans are also known for maintaining long-term relationships due to their ability to remember people. However, not much is known about what type of ability this ability is in apes. Recently, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has given some interesting findings regarding this. It states that chimpanzees and bonobos have the ability to recognize faces and can recognize faces even after being separated for 26 years. Researchers have found through an eye tracking test that chimpanzees and bonobos spend more time looking at old group mates than at strangers.

This suggests chimpanzees have long-term memory for face recognition. What's interesting is that the length of time they look at faces seems to correlate with the status of their past relationships. They look longer at faces with which they are close. From these findings it can be assumed that the excellent long-term memory capacity of humans may also be present in chimpanzees and bonobos. The reason behind this could also be their common ancestors millions of years ago.

The first author of this research, Laura Lewis, is associated with the University of California, Berkeley in America. Lewis told The Guardian, “These findings show that chimpanzees and bonobos have long-term memory. This study also suggests that the apes' memory is affected by their social interactions. This is surprising. The point is that the duration and type of this social memory is almost identical to the long-term memory of humans.” Earlier, some studies had revealed that chimpanzees have some ability to respond similar to humans.