2013年职称英语考试理工类新增文章内容.docVIP

第十一篇When our Eyes Serve our Stomach Our senses arent just delivering a strict view of whats going on in the world;theyre affected by whats going on in otir heads, A new study finds that hungry people see food-related words more clearly than people whove just eaten. Psychologists have known for decades that whats going on,inside our head affects our senses. For example,poorer cliildren think coins are larger than they are, and hungry people think pictures of food are brighter, Remi Radel of University of Nice Sopbia-Antipolis, France, wanted to investigate how this happens. Does it happen right away as the brain receives signals from the eyes or a little later as the brains high-level thinking processes get involved. Radel recruited 42 students with a normal body mass index.On the day of his or her rest,each student was told to arrive at the lab at noon after three or four hours of not eating. Then they were told there was a delay. Some were told to come back in 10 minutes;others were given an hour to get lunch first.So half the students were hungry when they did the experiment and the other half had just eaten. For the experiment,the participant looked at a computer screen. One by one ,80 words flashed on the screen for about 1/300th of a second each. They flashed at so small a size that the students could only consciously perceive. A quarter of the words were food-related. After each word , eachperson was asked how bright the word was and asked to choose which of two words theyd seen -a food-related word like cake or a neutral word like boat. Each word appeared too briefly for the participant to really read it. Hungry people saw the food-related words as brighter and were better at identifying food-related words. Because the word appeared too quickly for them to be reliably seen, this means that the difference is in perception not in thinking processes,Radel says. This is something great to me, Humans can really perceive what they need or what they stri