Average short-term memory span of animals is 27 seconds - and dogs can only remember for two minutes

Compared to humans, animals don't remember specific events, but instead tend to retain useful information that could help them survive.

Dogs forget an event within two minutes, while chimpanzees will forget at around 20 seconds. 

Baboons, pig-tailed macaques, and squirrel monkeys, meanwhile, have memories just slightly higher than bee.

This is according to a new study which looked at 25 species, ranging from pigeons to dolphins, and found animals only an average short-term memory span of animals was 27 seconds.

The study shows that animals have different memory systems divided into short term memory and specialised memories.

In short-term memory, creatures store information about almost anything but the information disappears quickly.

Animals also have a variety of specialised memories that, on the one hand, can only store a certain type of information, but on the other, the information is stored for a very long time.

For instance, a hoarding crow remembers the location of the hidden nuts for months, but the same bird has trouble remembering other things in other contexts for even a minute.

'This seems to apply to all animals except man,' says Magnus Enqvist, Professor of Ethology at Stockholm University.

Since chimps are our closest living relatives, Professor Lind told National Geographic he was surprised by their poor performance.

It suggests human capacity for memory evolved after we branched from the most recent shared ancestor with chimps, over six million years ago, he added.