If you ever get the impression that your dog can "tell" whether you look content or annoyed, you may be onto something. Dogs may indeed be able to distinguish between happy and angry human faces, according to a new study.
如果你曾经觉得你的狗能“分辨”出你是看起来满意还是生气，你可能会发现一些事情。根据一项新的研究，狗可能确实能够区分人类高兴和愤怒的面孔。
Researchers trained a group of 11 dogs to distinguish between images of the same person making either a happy or an angry face. During the training stage, each dog was shown only the upper half or the lower half of the person's face. The researchers then tested the dogs' ability to distinguish between human facial expressions by showing them the other half of the person's face on images totally different from the ones used in training. The researchers found that the dogs were able to pick the angry or happy face by touching a picture of it with their noses more often than one would expect by random chance.
研究人员训练了一组11只狗来区分同一个人做出快乐或愤怒表情的照片。在训练阶段，只给每只狗露出人的上半张或下半张脸。然后，研究人员通过在与训练中使用的图像完全不同的图像上向狗展示人的另一半面部来测试狗区分人类面部表情的能力。研究人员发现，这些狗能够通过用鼻子触摸照片来识别愤怒或快乐的面孔，这比人们猜测的随机概率高得多。
The study showed the animals had figured out how to apply what they learned about human faces during training to new faces in the testing stage. "We can rule out that the dogs simply distinguish between the pictures based on a simple cue, such as the sight of teeth," said study author Corsin Muller. "Instead, our results suggest that the successful dogs realized that a smiling mouth means the same thing as smiling eyes, and the same rule applies to an angry mouth having the same meaning as angry eyes."
研究表明，这些动物已经知道如何在测试阶段将它们在训练中所学到的人脸知识应用到新面孔上。研究人员科辛·穆勒说：“我们可以排除狗只是根据简单的线索来区分图片，比如看到牙齿。相反，实验结果表明，成功的狗知道微笑的嘴和微笑的眼睛是一样的，同样的规则也适用于生气的嘴和生气的眼睛。”
"With our study, we think we can now confidently conclude that at least some dogs can distinguish human facial expressions," Muller told Live Science.
穆勒告诉《生活科学》网站说：“通过我们的研究，我们认为现在可以自信地得出结论，至少有些狗可以分辨人类的面部表情。”
At this point, it is not clear why dogs seem to be equipped with the ability to recognize different facial expressions in humans. "To us, the most likely explanation appears to be that the basis lies in their living with humans, which gives them a lot of exposure to human facial expressions," and this exposure has provided them with many chances to learn to distinguish between them, Muller said.
目前，尚不清楚为什么狗似乎具有识别人类不同面部表情的能力。 穆勒说：“对我们来说，最有可能的解释似乎是，这一现象的根源在于它们与人类生活在一起，这让它们接触了大量人类的面部表情”，而这种接触也为它们提供了很多机会来学习区分它们。
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