A career in science has never been easy to pursue. There are all those years of graduate school, postdoctoral research positions that don’t necessarily lead to a faculty appointment, long hours and competition for grant money.

Two Japanese researchers have taken dedication to new heights, however. For the purposes of testing ape memory, they wrote, directed and starred in two short videos made for viewing by chimpanzees and bonobos. They report in a recent paper in Current Biology that apes can indeed remember an event after seeing it only once.

This is not a great surprise, but it plays into a continuing debate about what, exactly, nonhuman animals can remember.

In one of the laboratory of the apes movies, the two researchers, Fumihiro Kano and Satoshi Hirata of Kyoto University, wave at each other and the camera, and then each moves in an apelike fashion to positions near small doors, one on the left and one on the right. An actor in an ape suit comes through the door on the right and pounds on the back of Dr. Kano with his fists. Then he retreats through the door, and Dr. Kano follows. The other video has a slightly different plot that also involves an “ape suit guy,” as Dr. Kano described him, and aggression.