共用题干 When Our Eyes Serve Our Stomach
Our senses aren"t just delivering a strict view of what"s going on in the world;they"re af-fected by what"s going on in our heads. A new study finds that hungry people see food-related words more clearly than people who"ye just eaten.
Psychologists have known for decades that what"s going on,inside our head affects our senses. For example,poorer children think coins are larger than they are,and hungry people think pictures of food are brighter. Remi Radel of University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis,France,wanted to investi-gate how this happens. Does it happen right away as the brain receives signals from the eyes or a lit-tle later as the brain"s high-level thinking processes get involved.
Radel recruited 42 students with a normal body mass index. On the day of his or her test,each student was told to arrive at the lab at noon after three or four hours of not eating. Then they were told there was a delay. Some were told to come back in 10 minutes;others were given an hour to get lunch first. So half the students were hungry when they did the ex-periment and the other half had just eaten.
For the experiment,the participant looked at a computer screen. One by one,80 words flashed on the screen for about 1/300th of a second each. They flashed at so small a size that
the students could only consciously perceive. A quarter of the words were food-related. After each word,each person was asked how bright the word was and asked to choose which of two words they"d seen一a food-related word like cake or a neutral word like boat. Each word ap-peared too briefly for the participant to really read it.
Hungry people saw the food-related words as brighter and were better at identifying food-related words. Because the word appeared too quickly for them to be reliably seen,this means that the difference is in perception,not in thinking processes,Radel says.
“This is something great to me. Humans can really perceive what they need or what they strive for. From the experiment,I know that our brain can really be at the disposal of our mo-tives and needs,”Radel says. There was a delay in Radel"s experiment because_______.