VOA常速英语:Dogs Learn While They Sleep

A researcher puts electrodes on this older dog’s head to record its electrical brain activity.The recordings of 15 elderly dogs while they slept for three hours showed brief bursts of neural activity called sleep spindles.
研究人员把电极放在这只大龄狗的头上记录它的脑电波活动。15只大龄狗睡眠三个小时的录音显示了他们短暂的神经活动，叫做睡眠纺锤波。

From studies with humans and rodents, we know that they are extremely useful markers both of memory and cognition but also of aging and activity in the dog sleep spindles have only been described.They were never quantified. They were never related to function.This is the first time we were able to show that sleep spindles predict learning in the dog.The scientists found differences between male and female dogs. Female dogs have approximately on average twice as many spindles per minute as male dogs.They also happen to be the better learners. They memorize the tasks much better.
从人类和啮齿类动物的研究中，我们知道它们是记忆和认知的非常有用的标记，但在狗的睡眠纺锤波中的老化和活动只是一种描述而已。他们没有被量化，它们与生物体的功能没有任何关系。这是我们第一次能够证明睡眠纺锤波可以预测狗的学习活动。科学家们发现雄性狗和雌性狗有区别。雌性犬纺锤波平均每分钟比雄性狗多出两倍。她们恰好被发现是更好的学习者，她们能够把任务记得更牢。

But all the older dogs were less able to remember things especially when a lot is happening at the same time.
但是所有年龄较大的狗都不太容易记住事了，尤其是当许多事情同时发生的时候。

If you first time hide the reward into one pot and then in another and another, they get confused after a while so their performance is declining and they are getting less effective in solving novel problems and shifting from one task to another.Researchers hope the study will not only help understanding of cognitive ability and memory changes in dogs but also in the human aging process.
如果你第一次把奖励藏在一个罐子里，然后把它藏到另一个罐子里，他们会在一段时间后感到困惑，所以它们的效率在下降，它们在解决新问题和从一个任务转移到另一个任务时越来越不起作用。研究人员希望这项研究不仅有助于了解狗的认知能力和记忆变化，而且有助于研究人类的衰老过程。

Among very old dogs, up to 2/3 of them shows signs of dementia and this dementia is really very similar in a lot of aspects to that of humans,so we could use dogs as a natural model of human aging.
在非常年老的狗中，多达三分之二显示出痴呆的迹象，而这种痴呆在许多方面与人类非常相似，所以我们可以把狗作为人类衰老的一个自然模型。104.9109.7
The team has a dog brain and tissue bank to share samples of canine brain disease with researchers around the world.
这个团队有一个犬类的大脑和组织库，能与世界各地的研究人员分享犬脑疾病的样本。

Deborah Block, VOA News.
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