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科学美国人60秒 SSS 蒙娜丽莎效应并不适用于蒙娜丽莎

时间：2019-12-10 07:04:49

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（单词翻译）

 

This is Scientific American — 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.

Leonardo da Vinci's most famous painting also has an optical illusion named for it: the Mona Lisa effect. It's the feeling that the subject of a painting is following you with her gaze. "You continuously feel being looked at, despite moving to the left or moving to the right, perhaps even rotating the picture."

Sebastian Loth is a psychologist at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. And while he doesn't dispute that the illusion itself exists — you've probably also seen it in the Uncle Sam Army recruitment poster — he says there's a problem with the phenomenon's name.

"I can show you so many papers where people have literally1 started their introduction with 'We all know that Mona Lisa looks at you,' and so on and so forth2, and then they'd go into their argument, whatever it is, but actually she, in this specific picture, doesn't look at you."

He and his colleague Gernot Horstman conducted a scientific investigation3 of this claim by sitting 24 volunteers in front of a computer screen, which displayed various magnifications of the Mona Lisa. They placed rulers at two distances between the subjects and the screen. Then asked the subjects to indicate where on the rulers the Mona Lisa's gaze intersected.

"And then you can compute4 a line, that's basically school mathematics here, and then you can figure out the angle. And what came out was 15 degrees to the right." So the Mona Lisa actually stares over the viewer's right shoulder, he says. Not straight out of the canvas — the key to creating her namesake illusion. The write-up is in the journal i-Perception.

Loth says effects like these can have modern implications, too. For example, when building virtual assistants on computers, which might need to speak to — and make eye contact with — more than one person in a room. As for da Vinci's masterpiece, there's still another illusion that remains5: the mysterious ambiguity6 of the Mona Lisa's smile.

Thanks for listening for Scientific American — 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.


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1 literally 28Wzv     
adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实
参考例句：
  • He translated the passage literally.他逐字逐句地翻译这段文字。
  • Sometimes she would not sit down till she was literally faint.有时候，她不走到真正要昏厥了，决不肯坐下来。
2 forth Hzdz2     
adv.向前；向外，往外
参考例句：
  • The wind moved the trees gently back and forth.风吹得树轻轻地来回摇晃。
  • He gave forth a series of works in rapid succession.他很快连续发表了一系列的作品。
3 investigation MRKzq     
n.调查，调查研究
参考例句：
  • In an investigation,a new fact became known, which told against him.在调查中新发现了一件对他不利的事实。
  • He drew the conclusion by building on his own investigation.他根据自己的调查研究作出结论。
4 compute 7XMyQ     
v./n.计算，估计
参考例句：
  • I compute my losses at 500 dollars.我估计我的损失有五百元。
  • The losses caused by the floods were beyond compute.洪水造成的损失难以估量。
5 remains 1kMzTy     
n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹
参考例句：
  • He ate the remains of food hungrily.他狼吞虎咽地吃剩余的食物。
  • The remains of the meal were fed to the dog.残羹剩饭喂狗了。
6 ambiguity 9xWzT     
n.模棱两可；意义不明确
参考例句：
  • The telegram was misunderstood because of its ambiguity.由于电文意义不明确而造成了误解。
  • Her answer was above all ambiguity.她的回答毫不含糊。

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