Dramatic movie scenes make as big an impression on chimpanzees as they do on humans – especially if they feature a King Kong character, scientists discovered.

An experiment in which an actor dressed in an ape costume to play King Kong showed that the apes not only remembered once-seen events, but could anticipate exciting scenes they had seen before.

Researchers at Kyoto University’s Wildlife Research Centre in Japan created two series of short films – King Kong Attack and Revenge of King Kong – in which the apes were shown a familiar-looking environment where shockingly unexpected events take place.

In one, an aggressive person in an ape suit emerges from one of two identical doors. In the other, a human actor grabs one of two objects and attacks the ape-character with it. Eye-tracking technology showed that the animals anticipated what they are about to see after a single viewing of the movie.

They directed their attention to the door where King Kong made his entrance, and looked fixedly at the object they knew would be wielded as a weapon – even when its location was changed.

Lead scientist Fumihiro Kano said: “When you watch a shocking, emotional event in a movie, you remember the event well, and later on, when you watch the same movie, you anticipate the event.

“When shown a video for the second time, after a 24-hour delay, the apes clearly anticipated what was coming next. This demonstrates their ability to encode single-experience events into long-term memory.”

The researchers, whose findings appear in the journal Current Biology, were surprised to find that the apes really seemed to enjoy the films.