考研英语阅读篇章: 马能通过眼睛与耳朵相互交流
阅读基础如滴水穿石，连载考研英语阅读篇章，希望大家能保持阅读好习惯。考研英语阅读篇章: 马能通过眼睛与耳朵相互交流
Horses are sensitive to the facial expressions and attention of other
horses, including the direction of the eyes and ears. The findings, reported in
the Cell Press journal Current Biology on August 4, are a reminder for us humans
to look beyond our own limitations and recognize that other species may
communicate in ways that we can't, the researchers say. After all, human ears
aren't mobile. "Our study is the first to examine a potential cue to attention
that humans do not have: the ears," says Jennifer Wathan of the University of
Sussex. "Previous work investigating communication of attention in animals has
focused on cues that humans use: body orientation, head orientation, and eye
gaze(凝视); no one else had gone beyond that. However, we found that in horses
their ear position was also a crucial visual signal that other horses respond
to. In fact, horses need to see the detailed facial features of both eyes and
ears before they use another horse's head direction to guide them."
The new study also challenges the earlier held notion that animals with
eyes to the sides of their heads cannot glean(收集) information based on the
direction of one another's gaze.
Wathan and the study's senior author Karen McComb took photographs to
document cues given by horses when they were paying attention to something. Then
Wathan and McComb used those photographs as life-sized models for other horses
to look at as they chose between two feeding buckets. In each case, the horse in
the photo was paying attention to one of the buckets and not the other. In some
instances, the researchers also manipulated the image to remove information from
key facial areas, including the eyes and the ears.
The researchers' observations show that horses rely on the head orientation
of their peers to locate food. However, that ability to read each other's
interest level is disrupted when parts of the face -- the eyes and ears -- are
covered up with masks. The ability to correctly judge attention also varied
depending on the identity of the horse pictured, suggesting that individual
facial features may be important, the researchers report.
Wathan and McComb plan to continue to explore facial features related to
the expression of emotion in their horses, noting that horses' rich social lives
and close relationship to humans make them particularly interesting as study
subjects. Our understanding of horses' social lives might also have implications
for their welfare.
"Horses display some of the same complex and fluid social organization that
we have as humans and that we also see in chimpanzees, elephants, and dolphins,"
Wathan says. "The challenges that living in these societies create, such as
maintaining valuable social relationships on the basis of unpredictable
interactions, are thought to have promoted the evolution of advanced social and
communicative skills. There is a general interest in studying species with this
social structure."
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