《2016年职称英语(理工类)新增文章学习》.pdf
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2013年职称英语(理工类)新增文章学习
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第十一篇When Our Eyes Serve Our Stomach
Our senses aren‟t just delivering a strict view of what‟s going on in the world ; they‟re
affected by what‟s going on in our heads. A new study finds that hungry people see
food-related words more clearly than people who‟ve just eaten.
Psychologists have known for decades that what‟s going on, inside our head affects our
senses. For example, poorer children think coins are larger than they are, and hungry
people think pictures of food are brighter. Remi Radel of University of Nice
Sophia-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 brain‟s high-level
thinking processes get involved.
Radel recruited 42 students with a normal body mass index. On the day of his or her test,
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 l/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 ,each person was asked how bright the word was and asked
to choose which of two words they‟d 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
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