Robyn Williams: Now, you've heard of the stunning video released by the AAAS on Friday, it showed chimps looking at screens and memorising numbers up to 19, which were then replaced by blank squares which they had to count off, and they did so at lightning speed. See the video link on the Science Show website. Here's the man behind the research in Kyoto, Tetsuro Matsuzawa.

Tetsuro Matsuzawa: The chimpanzees can be better than us in a certain cognitive task, memorising numerals presented on the screen. The task is touching the numerals in an ascending order, one, two, three, four, five, six. Chimpanzees are really much, much better than humans in this task. Humans cannot do this task but chimpanzees can do it. My favourite explanation is the trade-off of memory and language. Chimpanzees are so good at memorising things at a glance. We are not so good at memorising things at a glance, but we can perceive the meaning of what we see. Chimps are living in the world here and now, but we are living in the world, thinking about the past, thinking about the future, and trying to understand the meaning of what we see, and bring the information back to the friends and family and colleagues to share the experience. Not many people recognise the importance of the language. The essence of language is portability, mobile. You can bring your own experience.

Robyn Williams: Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa from Kyoto University, and chimps leaving us looking pathetic with memory tests.

Victoria Wobber from Harvard takes this further.

Victoria Wobber: Tetsuro Matsuzawa is showing that chimpanzees are doing better than humans. I'm looking for cases where there are things we think are unique to humans that we are uniquely able to think about, and we are asking chimpanzees and bonobos whether they can think about those same things. And in fact we found a number of new areas where they seem to be able to solve problems and make decisions that parallel those of humans.

Places where I conduct my research are African ape sanctuaries and these are sites set up to house orphans of the bush-meat trade. You may know that chimpanzees and bonobos are hunted for their meat, and if individuals hunt a mother and find a baby they might take that baby home as a pet. They realise that it makes a horrible pet, then they put it out on the side of the road, and so these sanctuaries either confiscate individuals directly from the market or are caring for individuals who have been orphaned and kept as pets and then rejected.

There are sort of four main areas. The first is chimpanzees' capacities to cooperate with other individuals. And studies are now showing that chimpanzees know when they need to recruit a collaborative partner so they can determine when a task is not solvable by themselves. They can recruit another individual and then work together to solve that task. And in fact they can recruit more effective collaborators, so they can track who in their environment is the better collaborator and they actually selectively choose those individuals as collaborative partners. And this is work mainly done by Alicia Melis, but I've worked on adapting this work for bonobos as well.

And what the work with bonobos suggests is that social tolerance really importantly mediates cognitive capacities for cooperation, and in fact bonobos may be able to better express their cooperative capacities because they are more tolerant of one another. And what I mean by 'tolerance'…look at the fact that we're all able to sit in this room next to one another and not be aggressive towards one another. That's a fairly high level of social tolerance. And so that may enable humans as well as bonobos to display these capacities for cooperation in a broader array of circumstances than do chimpanzees where the capacities are there but levels of tolerance might constrain them.

The other area of work that I'll talk about is in decision-making, and this is something where actually we see that patterns of economic decision-making, something we think of as really human and unique to market economies, might be shared with other apes. In addition, some of my work has shown that chimpanzees will selectively choose food items, and this is an area of interest given the argument that humans prefer cooked food, and we found that apes also prefer cooked to raw food. Again, another example where they are making deliberate decisions about what they choose to eat in a way that converges with what we see in humans. They prefer cooked meat to raw meat, cooked tubers like potatoes to raw tubers. And so on the whole these results really show a number of similarities in cognitive capacities between chimpanzees, bonobos and humans that are really exciting in thinking about these apes as cognitively sophisticated animals.

Robyn Williams: Dr Victoria Wobber of Harvard. So we can be like chimps and they like us in high functioning behaviour, but what about pathology? This is Dr Neal Barnard, president of Physicians for Responsible Medicine.

Neal Barnard: What we're really seeing, both in the presentations of Dr Matsuzawa and Dr Wobber, and also the one that will be presented tomorrow but isn't here today, Dr Martin Brune, who is going to talk about striking similarities, not in normal psychological functioning but in psychopathology between humans who have post-traumatic stress disorder or depression or anxiety and chimpanzees who show exactly the same kind of signs. And what this is leading us to is a seismic change in our relationship with our research subjects.

At the end of 2011 the Institute of Medicine issued a report saying that by and large we don't really need a lot of the uses of chimpanzees in research. It wasn't an ethical conclusion, it was a scientific and practical conclusion, saying there are other ways to do this research. They gave the report to NIH which last month, January 23, issued a draft working group report that said, okay, NIH has 360 chimpanzees, 310 of them are going to be out of a job. You're going to a sanctuary, we don't need you, we're going to keep the 50 just in case. In other words, they are saying for the first time that this use of animals in research was something they were effectively bringing to an end.

Now, that leaves 400 or so privately held chimpanzees. Where this leads us, in my view, is to looking at the ethics of it. In the law that handles human research participation, the common rule says there are some human beings who are vulnerable, and they are vulnerable because cognitively they can't understand what the experiment is about, or it may be that for some social reason, they are in prison, they need extra protection. And the Belmont Report which came out in 1979 and that all of us investigators have to sign on to said much the same thing, there have to be special provisions.

So what are these provisions? The National Bioethics Advisory Commission listed six, but one of them is if you have a cognitive impairment or a communicative impairment, you can't read the consent form and understand it. The second one is, is there something institutional, are you imprisoned, so it's hard for you to say no? The third is are you in a socially denigrated group? But then if you look at chimpanzees, well, they satisfy all of those. Cognitively, as smart as Dr Matsuzawa's chimpanzees are, they are not good with a consent form. They have absolutely no capacity to refuse, and they are in a socially denigrated group where whatever protections might be brought to the fore are often left out.

So if that's the case, then they are very much like human children. Human children then can be used in research but only under very certain circumstances, and they always have a third party representing their interest. In every animal laboratory there is an IACUC, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, there is the public member, but their job is not to represent the animals, their job is to represent the public. And there is no advocate for the animals.

What I'm suggesting is, along with the seismic change in our recognition that maybe we don't need some of these experiments anymore, we also need ethically to shift our thinking, to say animals qualify as vulnerable subjects, at least in regard to chimpanzees, and it's a worthwhile thing to consider other animal species as well. If we do that it's not simply theoretical, it means that a whole new layer of protection has to be instituted in the form of third parties who would have only the interests of the subject at hand. Would this change and how research is done? Dramatically. Should it be done? It's not too late to begin.

Robyn Williams: Dr Neal Barnard from George Washington University in DC, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. And, by the way, they also announced that distressed chimps react as we do when treated with antidepressants; they get better.

We were at the AAAS in Boston, Massachusetts. More next week. And don't miss that video on the Science Show website.

Production by David Fisher and Marty Peralta. I'm Robyn Williams.