Who is speaking? Implicit and explicit self and other voice recognition.

In the domain of self-recognition, voice is a critical feature for self/other distinction. The aim of this study was to explore if people have an implicit and/or explicit knowledge of their voice. A group of healthy participants were submitted to an implicit and an explicit self-voice recognition task. They listened to pairs of pre-recorded auditory stimuli (words or pseudowords) pronounced by themselves, by a familiar or an unfamiliar person. Afterwards, in the "Implicit task" participants had to judge whether the pair of stimuli were pronounced by same or different speakers; in the "Explicit task" they had to identify if one of the stimuli was or not their own voice. Results showed a difference between Implicit and Explicit tasks since participants were more accurate in implicit than explicit self voice-recognition. Moreover, in the Implicit task, participants had the same level of accuracy when they had to judge stimuli pronounced with self or others' voice, whereas when an explicit voice-recognition was required, they were less accurate with self than with others' voice.