Understanding the mechanisms of familiar voice-identity recognition in the human brain

Maguinness, Corrina; Roswandowitz, Claudia; Kriegstein, Katharina von

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.03.039

Cited by 86 publications

(98 citation statements)

References 147 publications

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“…Possibly, this is because listeners need more and more variable experience with a talker's voice to arrive at a representation of vocal identity that is sufficiently reliable to alleviate distraction by irrelevant concurrent speech. This explanation is consistent with a recent extension (Maguinness et al, 2018) of the prototype model of voice-identity processing (Lavner et al, 2001). While listeners can recognize familiar talkers based on stored reference patterns of their vocal identities, such reference patterns need to be yet established for unfamiliar talkers and may not suffice robust identity recognition of moderately familiar talkers.…”

Section: Uncertainty About Vocal Identity Causes Working-memory Disrusupporting

confidence: 91%

“…Our results rather speak to more general differences in how familiar and unfamiliar talkers are processed (for a recent review, see Maguinness et al, 2018). We argue that the disparity of findings both within and across studies can be explained by a model that takes these differences into account, in particularly with regard to how familiarity shapes the representation of vocal identity.…”

Section: Uncertainty About Vocal Identity Causes Working-memory Disrumentioning

confidence: 49%

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Working-memory disruption by task-irrelevant talkers depends on degree of talker familiarity

Kreitewolf

Wöstmann

Tune

et al. 2018

Preprint

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23When listening, familiarity with an attended talker's voice improves speech 24 comprehension. Here, we instead investigated the effect of familiarity with a distracting 25 talker. In an irrelevant-speech task, we assessed listeners' working memory for the serial 26 order of spoken digits when a task-irrelevant, distracting sentence was produced by either 27 a familiar or an unfamiliar talker. We tested two groups of listeners using the same

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Section: Uncertainty About Vocal Identity Causes Working-memory Disrusupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Uncertainty About Vocal Identity Causes Working-memory Disrumentioning

confidence: 49%

Working-memory disruption by task-irrelevant talkers depends on degree of talker familiarity

Kreitewolf

Wöstmann

Tune

et al. 2018

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Prototype models of voice processing may offer some insights into the nature of the different representations of familiar and unfamiliar voices. Such prototype models propose that listeners encode and process voice identity information in relation to a prototype, which is a context‐dependent average voice (Latinus & Belin, ; Latinus et al ., ; Lavner et al ., ; Papcun et al ., ; see also Maguinness et al ., ). While empirical studies show some support for these models, these studies have to our knowledge only explored prototype models with a focus on between ‐speaker variability by using different voice identities (see Lavan et al ., , for a discussion).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Despite this growing body of literature, current models of voice processing do not explicitly account for within‐person variability. For example, prototype models are often used as a theoretical basis to map out how different identities are encoded and how they may relate to each other (Latinus & Belin, ; Latinus, McAleer, Bestelmeyer, & Belin, ; Lavner, Rosenhouse, & Gath, ; Papcun, Kreiman, & Davis, ; see also Maguinness, Roswandowitz, & Von Kriegstein, ). These prototype models however solely focus on between ‐speaker variability, with each identity being conceptualized as a single point in space, neglecting to account for the substantial within‐person variability.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How many voices did you hear? Natural variability disrupts identity perception from unfamiliar voices

Lavan

Burston

Garrido

2018

British J of Psychology

115

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Our voices sound different depending on the context (laughing vs. talking to a child vs. giving a speech), making within-person variability an inherent feature of human voices. When perceiving speaker identities, listeners therefore need to not only 'tell people apart' (perceiving exemplars from two different speakers as separate identities) but also 'tell people together' (perceiving different exemplars from the same speaker as a single identity). In the current study, we investigated how such natural within-person variability affects voice identity perception. Using voices from a popular TV show, listeners, who were either familiar or unfamiliar with this show, sorted naturally varying voice clips from two speakers into clusters to represent perceived identities. Across three independent participant samples, unfamiliar listeners perceived more identities than familiar listeners and frequently mistook exemplars from the same speaker to be different identities. These findings point towards a selective failure in 'telling people together'. Our study highlights within-person variability as a key feature of voices that has striking effects on (unfamiliar) voice identity perception. Our findings not only open up a new line of enquiry in the field of voice perception but also call for a re-evaluation of theoretical models to account for natural variability during identity perception.

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“…Although it is commonly assumed that prototypes are statistical averages derived from multiple samples of a given talker's voice (e.g., Latinus and Belin 2011a;Maguinness et al 2018), to our knowledge no data exist about how much detail (and what kind of detail) about quality is actually needed to specify the prototype, and how much is reserved as "deviations" from the prototype. Second, the nature (or even the existence) of similar reference patterns for individual talkers and the way in which within-talker variation affects formation of these patterns have not to our knowledge been addressed, although such patterns would seem to be essential for the formation of stable representations of voices and thus for voice recognition (Lavan et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acoustic voice variation within and between speakers

Lee

Keating

Kreiman

2019

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Little is known about the nature or extent of everyday variability in voice quality. This paper describes a series of principal component analyses to explore within-and between-talker acoustic variation and the extent to which they conform to expectations derived from current models of voice perception. Based on studies of faces and cognitive models of speaker recognition, we hypothesized that a few measures would be important across speakers, but that much of within-speaker variability would be idiosyncratic. Analyses used multiple sentence productions from fifty female and fifty male speakers of English, recorded over three days. Twenty-six acoustic variables from a psychoacoustic model of voice quality were measured every 5 ms on vowels and approximants. Across speakers the balance between higher harmonic amplitudes and inharmonic energy in the voice accounted for the most variance (fe-males=20%, males=22%). Formant frequencies and their variability accounted for an additional 12% of variance across speakers. Remaining variance appeared largely idiosyncratic, suggesting that the speaker-specific voice space is different for different people. Results further showed that voice spaces for individuals and for the population of talkers have very similar acoustic structures. Implications for prototype models of voice perception and recognition are discussed.

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Understanding the mechanisms of familiar voice-identity recognition in the human brain

Cited by 86 publications

References 147 publications

Working-memory disruption by task-irrelevant talkers depends on degree of talker familiarity

Working-memory disruption by task-irrelevant talkers depends on degree of talker familiarity

How many voices did you hear? Natural variability disrupts identity perception from unfamiliar voices

Acoustic voice variation within and between speakers

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