Archerfish(射水鱼), a species famous for spitting (吐) water to shoot insects out of the air, can recognize one human face from another.
In the laboratory, instead of shooting insects, the fish were taught to spit at pictures of human faces showed on a computer screen outside their aquarium. The fish were first introduced to two faces, and taught to spit at one of them in exchange for a food reward. The researchers then tested whether the fish would recognize and spit at the face they had learned from among 44 new ones. And they were right more than 80% of the time.
To the researchers’ surprise, even when they did that with faces that were in black and white, the fish were still able to find the face they were trained to recognize.
Telling one human face from another is a surprisingly difficult task. As we all have two eyes above a nose and a mouth, doing so depends on recognizing some extremely small differences.
“It has been supposed that this task is so difficult that it can only be completed by higher animals, which have a large and complex brain,” said Newport, whose study was published in the journal Scientific Reports. “But the archerfish were able to do this without having a neocortex, the most recently developed part of the brain. In humans, the neocortex governs our sense and language.”
“Fish have a simpler brain than humans and they don’t have the section of the brain that humans use for recognizing faces,” Newport said. “Even though, many fish show amazing visual (视力的) behaviors and therefore make the perfect subjects to test whether simple brains can complete complex tasks.”
【小题1】What were the archerfish asked to do in the laboratory?| A．Pick out the face they knew. |
| B．Shoot the computers from a far distance. |
| C．Count the number of faces on the screen. |
| D．Pick out black and white pictures from colorful ones. |
| A．They have a complex brain. | B．Their neocortex is very large. |
| C．They belong to higher animals. | D．They have excellent eyesight. |
| A．To encourage people to protect fish. |
| B．To introduce a kind of fish with special ability. |
| C．To introduce the result of a study on archerfish. |
| D．To show that animals with simpler brains are smarter. |
