To call someone bird-brained in English means you think that person is silly or stupid.
在英语中称某人为“鸟脑”意味着你认为那个人很愚蠢。
But will this description soon disappear from use in the light of recent research? It seems the English may have been unfair in association bird’s brains with stupidity.
但是，根据最近的研究，这种描述会很快消失吗？英国人把鸟的大脑和愚蠢联系在一起似乎是不公平的。
In an attempt to find out how different creatures see the world, psychologists at Brown University in the USA have been comparing the behaviour of birds and humans. One experiment has involved teaching pigeons to recognize letters of the English alphabet. The birds study in “classrooms”, which are boxes equipped with a computer. After about four days of studying a particular letter, the pigeon has to pick out that letter from several displayed on the computer screen. Three male pigeons have learnt to distinguish all twenty-six letters of the alphabet in this way.
为了找出不同的生物是如何看待世界的，美国布朗大学的心理学家一直在比较鸟类和人类的行为。其中一个实验是教鸽子识别英语字母表中的字母。这些鸟在“教室”里学习，这些教室是装有电脑的盒子。在研究了一个特定的字母大约四天后，鸽子必须从电脑屏幕上显示的几个字母中选出那个字母。三只公鸽子已经学会了用这种方式区分字母表中的全部二十六个字母。
A computer record of the birds’ four-month study period has shown surprising similarities between the pigeons’ and human performance. Pigeons and people find the same letters easy, or hard, to tell apart. For example, 92 per cent of the time the pigeons could tell the letter D from the letter Z. But when faced with U and V (often confused by English children), the pigeons were right only 34 per cent of the time.
一份关于鸽子四个月研究期的计算机记录显示，鸽子的表现和人类的表现惊人地相似。鸽子和人发现相同的字母很容易区分，或者很难区分。例如，92%的时间鸽子能分辨出字母D和字母Z。但当面对U和V（英国孩子经常混淆）时，鸽子只有34%的时间是正确的。
The results of the experiments so far have led psychologists to conclude that pigeons and humans observe things in similar ways. This suggests that there is something fundamental about the recognition process. If scientists could only discover just what this recognition process is it could be very useful for computer designers. The disadvantage of a present computer is that it can only do what a human being has programmed it to do and the programmer must give the computer precise, logical instructions. Maybe in the future, though, computers will be able to think like human beings.
迄今为止的实验结果使心理学家得出结论，鸽子和人类观察事物的方式相似。这表明识别过程有一些基本的东西。如果科学家们能发现这种识别过程是什么，那么对计算机设计师来说可能非常有用。现有计算机的缺点是，它只能做人类编程的事情，程序员必须给计算机精确、逻辑的指令。也许在未来，计算机将能够像人类一样思考。
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