Pigs may have a decided lack of table manners, but they are otherwise one of the more intelligent animals around.
Further evidence of their intellect has come from a new study that examined how well pigs might do with a simple video game and joystick. Given sufficient motivation, pigs know how to play.
Candace Croney of Purdue University published the results in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Four pigs — Hamlet, Omelet, Ebony, and Ivory were taken in front of a screen that featured a simple game where a cursor (光标) could be directed into a wall with a joystick. If the pig was able to hit the wall with the cursor, they’d be rewarded with food.
All of the pigs had some success, but there was a clear difference in skill. Two of the pigs, Hamlet and Omelet, found the game’s increasing difficulty with two or more walls hard to navigate (指引). Ivory was clearly better than Ebony, hitting the wall 76 percent of the time to Ebony’s 34 percent.
Their success may have been restricted somewhat by their long mouth. Because their long mouths are right in front of their eyes when they look directly at the screen. They may have caught glimpses of the screen only before and after moving the joystick, not during. That could mean the pigs had to rely on some short-term memory to understand the movement of the cursor.
Curiously, the pigs continued playing even after the food reward was taken away. Researchers gave them gentle verbal encouragement to continue.
This isn’t Croney’s first study with pigs. Back in 1997, she focused her doctoral work on pig cognizance (认知), including a task in which pigs used a joystick to move one of several shapes across the screen to fit the single shape that matched it. Such experiments demonstrate that pigs appear to understand the connection between moving the joystick and the cursor, and that doing so successfully results in a reward.
【小题1】What does paragraph 3 mainly talk about?| A．What pigs can learn. | B．Why pigs are intelligent. |
| C．How the study is conducted. | D．Why researchers do the study. |
| A．Their long mouths block the view. |
| B．The joystick is far from the screen. |
| C．The cursor only appears after moving the joystick. |
| D．They concentrate on the movements of the joystick. |
| A．They are interested in food. |
| B．They are intelligent in some ways. |
| C．They are equally skilled at playing games. |
| D．They don’t play games without food. |
| A．Pigs Lack Table Manners |
| B．Pigs Have Good Memories |
| C．Pigs Can Be Taught to Play Video Games |
| D．Pigs Are More Intelligent than Other Animals |
