科学美国人60秒 羊的面部读脸技巧非常出众（在线收听）

Here’s one of the stranger celebrity sightings out there: Researchers have confirmed that sheep can recognize the actors Emma Watson and Jake Gyllenhaal.

一个不太出名的名人说道：研究人员已经正式，羊可以认出艾玛·沃特森和杰克·吉伦哈尔。

"Yeah I think it's very cool." Jennifer Morton is a neurobiologist at the University of Cambridge. "The reason we chose celebrities is we were sure they'd never met these people."

“我觉得很酷。”詹妮弗·莫顿是剑桥大学的神经生物学家。我们选择名人的原因是我们确认它们从没有见过这些人。

The experiment worked like this. First, Morton's team trained eight sheep to recognize the famous faces. And the sheep correctly chose the celeb's face over a stranger's 80 percent of the time.

实验过程是这样的。首先，莫顿团队训练了8只羊认识明星。在多数时间里，相比于陌生人，羊群正确认出了明星。

Next they presented faces at a slight angle. The sheep got only two-thirds of those right. But that's on par with how human performance dips for the same problem.

接下来，实验人员以小角度呈现这些明星的脸。羊群的正确率仅为2/3。但是这与人类在此项的表现是相同的。

Proving that sheep have advanced facial recognition skills, the scientists say…comparable to humans or our primate cousins. The study is in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

科学家们说，这表明羊有高超的面部识别技能，这与人类或者灵长类动物不相上下。该研究结果发表在《英国皇家协会开放科学》杂志上。

If you're wondering, "Why sheep?"

如果你感到惊奇“为什么是绵羊呢?”

"Sheep chose me rather than the other way around." There's a good model of Huntington's disease in sheep. So Morton says studying cognitive tasks like facial recognition in sheep--and the decline in those abilities in Huntington's sheep—might offer insights into the human condition.

“绵羊可以很好的辨别人类，但是我们人类却不能辨别绵羊。”绵羊是一种很好的的亨廷顿氏病的模型。所以，莫顿表示，研究认知能力例如绵羊的面部识别技能——亨廷顿羊的能力下降——或许可以为研究人类提供见解。