机器人的凝视

浙江 李 恒

意大利的研究人员发现，与机器人对视同样会触发人类的社交互动神经活动。

题材科技体裁说明文文章词数330难度★★★建议用时6分钟

1Have you ever made eye contact with a robot? It can be a very strange experience.Now,researchers in Italy have found that it is more than just a feeling.They ran an experiment that showed how a robot's gaze can trick people into thinking they are socially interacting with a human being.That experience can slow a person's ability to make decisions.

2“A gaze is an extremely important social signal that we employ on a day-to-day basis when we're interacting with others,”said Professor Agnieszka Wykowska. She is the lead writer of a study on the research.

3“The question is whether the robot's gaze will evoke very similar mechanisms in the human brain as another human's gaze would,”Wykowska said.

4The team asked 40 people to play a video game of“chicken”. In the game, each player had to decide whether to permit a car to drive straight toward another car or to turn to avoid a crash.The people were playing against a human-like robot sitting across from them.

5During breaks in the game, players had to look at the robot. Sometimes the robot would look back and other times it would look away.As the interactions happened,the scientists collected data on behavior and brain activity.

6“Our results show that, actually, the human brain processes the robot's gaze as a social signal, and that signal has an impact on the way we're making decisions, on the strategies we deploy in the game and also on our responses,”Wykowska said.

7“The gaze of the robot affects decisions by delaying them,so humans are much slower in making the decisions in the game,”she added.

8The findings can be useful for helping to decide where and how human-like robots might be placed in the future.“When it is understood when and how robots change social behavior, then we can decide which sort of context is desirable and beneficial to humans and in which context this should not occur,”Wykowska said.

Reading Check

Choose the best answers according to the text

Language Study

Ⅰ.Analyze the difficult sentence in the text

They ran an experiment that showed how a robot's gaze can trick people into thinking they are socially interacting with a human being.他们进行了一项实验，该实验展示了机器人的凝视如何诱使人们认为他们正在与人类进行社交互动。

【点石成金】本句是一个主从复合句，句中的that 引导定语从句，how 引导的宾语从句作动词showed 的宾语；they are socially interacting with a human being 是省略了that的宾语从句，作动词thinking的宾语。

Ⅱ.Memorize some text-centered chunks

more than 不止；超过

interact with 与……交流

make decisions 做决策；做决定

have an impact on 对……有影响

be useful for 对……有用