By Christine H. Chen
Fall 2017 Intern
The ability to
recognize familiar faces or to learn to recognize new ones is a complex image
process that we, humans, take for granted. Other mammals such as chimps have
that ability, but what about sheep?
A recent study revealed
that scientists succeeded in training sheep to recognize the faces of four
celebrities by repeatedly presenting the sheep with photographs of their faces.
Then the sheep were shown two different photos on separate computer screens—one
of the “learned” celebrity and one of an unknown face. The sheep were able to
identify the learned face eight times out of ten.
The
sheep were also able to recognize their handler from a photograph, a task that
requires shifting from a 3D to a 2D representation, demonstrating that sheep
have face recognition abilities similar to humans’. Further research might also
shed light
on whether sheep can identify emotional expressions on human faces—imagine that
while you’re counting sheep at night!
No comments:
Post a Comment