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  3. You wrinkle your nose and narrow your eyelids if you see a dead rat in the road, but you open your eyes and mouth wide if you se

You wrinkle your nose and narrow your eyelids if you see a dead rat in the road, but you open your eyes and mouth wide if you se

admin2015-07-13  41
问题     You wrinkle your nose and narrow your eyelids if you see a dead rat in the road, but you open your eyes and mouth wide if you see a live one in your bedroom. Why is that? Facial expressions are usually thought of as simple tools of communication, but in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals Charles Darwin proposed that they may prepare us to react to situa-tions when he noticed that some expressions seemed to be used across cultures and even species. Now Joshua Susskind and his colleagues at the University of Toronto, Canada, have put that idea to the test.
    Susskind’s team wondered whether the characteristic expressions of fear—eyes wide open, eyebrows raised and mouth agape—might improve how sensory information is acquired and so increase alertness. Conversely disgust—with the face all squeezed up—might blunt the senses, shielding us from unpleasant sights and smells.
    The researchers asked subjects to complete various tests while holding a fearful, disgusted or neutral expression. In one they had to identify when a spot entered their field of view. In another they were required to shift their focus as quickly as possible between two targets on a computer screen. How much air the volunteers breathed in while expressing fear and disgust was also measured.
    In each case the wide-eyed Home Alone (the movie series starring Macaulay Culkin) face let significantly more of the world in. Subjects with wide-open eyes detected peripheral objects more quickly and performed side-to-side eye movements faster. They also took in more air with each breath without exerting any extra effort. An Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan showed the nasal cavity was enlarged while subjects held this expression, which the team suggest could be linked with a greater ability to absorb odors.
    "These changes are consistent with the idea that fear, for example, is a posture towards vigilance, and disgust a posture towards sensory rejection," says Susskind. His team is already at work on experiments to explore to what extent the brain can use this extra information to enhance performance. "What was nice was the number of different ways they got at this question," says Elizabeth Phelps at New York University. "They were very creative." She thinks the work could open up a whole new way of thinking about facial expressions.
In the last paragraph, what might be the new thinking of facial expressions?
选项 A、They might tell the brain how to make use of the superficial information.
B、They might explain why people consider fear as a posture towards vigilance.
C、They might provide extra information to brains thus refining performance.
D、They might clarify the relationship between brain and environments.
答案C
解析 推理判断题。该段中提到苏斯金德的团队已经开始着手探索大脑究竟能在多大程度上利用这些额外信息来提高其运作能力，该句中的experiment和explore都提示了考生这一探索是实验性的，是新的研究思路，故选C项。
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