睡不好的人更不容易辨别人脸...? [E523]

Poor Sleepers Worse at Recognizing Unfamiliar Faces

By Christopher Intagliata

Standing in line[排队] at passport control[护照检查处] isn't the most relaxing experience. The officer looks at your passport… at you… back at your passport… back at you. Kind of nerve wracking[使人心烦的;伤脑筋的]. But put yourself in their shoes[设身处地的考虑;换位思考]. They're trying to figure out if your face is actually the same one as that little thumbnail image[缩略图] on the page. Not the easiest task.

"People are often surprised at how poor they are." David White, a cognitive psychologist[认知心理学家] at the University of New South Wales[新南威尔士大学] in Australia. He's even tested Australian passport agents at the task. "Their performance was no better than a group of untrained university students."

In his latest study, White and his colleagues investigated how poor sleep[睡不好;睡眠不佳]--less than six and a half hours a night--might affect facial recognition[人脸识别;面部识别]. Turns out[事实证明;结果呢], bad sleep did lead to more wrong answers on a face-matching task. And study subjects suffering from insomnia[1], meaning poor sleep plus other symptoms like anxiety, scored badly, too, compared to well-rested subjects.

But here's the twist[2]: "When they made errors, people in this insomnia group, they actually had higher levels of confidence." They were more sure of their wrong answers. The results are in Royal Society Open Science.[Louise Beattie et al., ]

To avoid these kinds of errors, White suggests security organizations pay more attention to which employees may be sleeping poorly. "That's more a sort of everyday occurrence, certainly for new parents or people that may have their sleep disrupted by shift work[轮班;倒班], which is very common in these security and forensic[法庭的;与法庭有关的;法医的] settings." And that they screen[3] staffers[职员,工作人员] for signs of insomnia, and consider assigning those officers to different jobs, that don't involve scrutinizing[4] faces all day. Precautions[预防措施] that may help the rest of us sleep a little easier, too.

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[1]insomnia [ɪnˈsɒmniə]

the condition of being unable to sleep, over a period of time 失眠（症）

Holly suffered from insomnia caused by stress at work.

霍莉在女儿出生后失眠了好几个月。

[2]twist：a change in the way in which something happens 变化；转折；改变

The story took a surprise twist today with media reports that the doctor had resigned.

媒体报道该医生已经辞职，从而使事情在今天有了惊人的转折。

The incident was the latest twist in the continuing saga of fraud and high scandal in banks and stock brokerages.

此事件是银行和股票经纪公司持续不断的诈骗和高层丑闻的最新发展。

[3]screen：to test or examine someone or something to discover if there is anything wrong with him, her, or it 测试；检查

Women over 50 should be screened for breast cancer.

所有50岁以上的妇女都要作乳腺癌筛查。

Completely unsuitable candidates were screened out (= tested and refused) at the first interview.

完全不合格的求职者在第一轮面试时就被筛选掉了。

[注]此处句意应该是：David White建议安检相关部门（海关安检/护照检查）对睡眠不好的员工要加以关注，看看职员中有没有失眠症的现象，有的话要把他们分配到其它不需要辨别可疑人脸的工作中。

[4]scrutinize [ˈskruːtɪnaɪz]

to examine something very carefully in order to discover information 细看，仔细审查

He scrutinized the men's faces carefully/closely, trying to work out who was lying.

他仔细端详这些男子的脸，想弄清谁在撒谎。

[5]本文选自Scientific American的60-Second Science，原文链接:http://t.cn/RVTNFNm 查看完整合集，后台回复：60s

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