科学美国人60秒:Poor Sleepers Worse at Recognizing Unfamiliar Faces

Standing in line at passport control isn't the most relaxing experience. The officer looks at your passport… at you… back at your passport… back at you. Kind of nerve wracking. But put yourself in their shoes. They're trying to figure out if your face is actually the same one as that little thumbnail image on the page. Not the easiest task.
在护照检查处排队并不是一件轻松的事情。官员会看看你的护照，然后在看看你，然后再看看你的护照，然后再看看你。有点烦人。但是，从他们的立场想想。他们试图判别你是否和那个小的照片是同一个人。这可不是一件容易的事情。

"People are often surprised at how poor they are." David White, a cognitive psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia. He's eventested Australian passport agents at the task. "Their performance was no better than a group of untrained university students."
“对于这些护照检查官员的判别能力，人们通常会非常的惊讶。”大卫·怀特是澳大利亚新南威尔士大学的认知心理学家。“这些官员和那些没有经过训练的大学生的表现差不多。”

In his latest study, White and his colleagues investigated how poor sleep--less than six and a half hours a night--might affect facial recognition. Turns out, bad sleep did lead to more wrong answers on a face-matching task. And study subjects suffering from insomnia, meaning poor sleep plus other symptoms like anxiety, scored badly, too, compared to well-rested subjects.
在怀特最新的研究中，他和同事们调查了睡眠不足——每晚睡眠小于六个半小时是如何影响识别人脸的。结果表明，睡眠质量差会导致在人脸匹配任务上，错误增多。实验将患有失眠，即睡眠质量差以及其他症状如焦虑、表现不好实验对象和休息好的实验对象相比。

But here's the twist: "When they made errors, people in this insomnia group, they actually had higher levels of confidence." They were more sure of their wrong answers. The results are in Royal Society Open Science.
“但是，令人纠结的事情出现了：失眠组的人们，在犯错误的时候，仍非常的有信心。”他们坚信自己的错误答案。该研究结果发表在《皇家学会开放科学》杂志上。

To avoid these kinds of errors, White suggests security organizations pay more attention to which employees may be sleeping poorly. "That's more a sort of everyday occurrence, certainly for new parents or people that may have their sleep disrupted by shift work, which is very common in these security and forensic settings." And that they screen staffers for signs of insomnia, and consider assigning those officers to different jobs, that don't involve scrutinizing faces all day. Precautions that may help the rest of us sleep a little easier, too.
为了避免这种错误，怀特建议，安全机构应更加关注缺乏睡眠的职工。“睡眠不好几乎每天都在发生，特别对于新手父母以及由于轮班而影响睡眠的人们，缺乏睡眠在安全以及医疗机构非常常见。”观察员工的失眠迹象，然后指派给他们不同的工作，这些工作不需要整天识别人脸。采取预防措施也可以让我们更容易入睡。