They remembered a series of numbers better than the undergraduates, reports the Daily Mirror.
Scientists say the university challenge proves that in some memory tests chimps are more intelligent than humans.
Japanese researchers pitted three pairs of five-year-old chimps and their mothers against a dozen students.
Each group was shown numbers from one to nine on a touch screen. When they touched the first number, the other eight turned into white squares.
The test was to touch the remaining squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there. All the young chimps scored higher than the undergraduates.
One of them, Ayumu, was outstanding. Researchers included him and nine students in a second test. This time, five numbers flashed up before being replaced by white squares.
When the numbers were displayed for seven-tenths of a second, Ayumu and the students scored about 80%.
But when the numbers were displayed for an even shorter time, the chimp got the sequence right twice as often. Even after six months' training the students could not match the chimps.
Researcher Tetsoro Matsuzawa, of Kyoto University, said: "Young chimps have an extraordinary memory - often better than humans."
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