Fontaine Maureen, Love Scott A, Latinus Marianne
UMR7289, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut de Neuroscience de la Timone, Aix-Marseille UniversitéMarseille, France.
Front Psychol. 2017 Jul 14;8:1180. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01180. eCollection 2017.
The ability to recognize an individual from their voice is a widespread ability with a long evolutionary history. Yet, the perceptual representation of familiar voices is ill-defined. In two experiments, we explored the neuropsychological processes involved in the perception of voice identity. We specifically explored the hypothesis that familiar voices (trained-to-familiar (Experiment 1), and famous voices (Experiment 2)) are represented as a whole complex pattern, well approximated by the average of multiple utterances produced by a single speaker. In experiment 1, participants learned three voices over several sessions, and performed a three-alternative forced-choice identification task on original voice samples and several "speaker averages," created by morphing across varying numbers of different vowels (e.g., [a] and [i]) produced by the same speaker. In experiment 2, the same participants performed the same task on voice samples produced by familiar speakers. The two experiments showed that for famous voices, but not for trained-to-familiar voices, identification performance increased and response times decreased as a function of the number of utterances in the averages. This study sheds light on the perceptual representation of familiar voices, and demonstrates the power of average in recognizing familiar voices. The speaker average captures the unique characteristics of a speaker, and thus retains the information essential for recognition; it acts as a prototype of the speaker.
通过声音识别个体的能力是一种广泛存在且具有悠久进化历史的能力。然而,熟悉声音的感知表征却并不明确。在两项实验中,我们探究了声音身份感知所涉及的神经心理过程。我们特别探讨了这样一种假设,即熟悉的声音(实验1中经过训练变得熟悉的声音,以及实验2中的著名声音)被表征为一种整体的复杂模式,由单个说话者发出的多个话语的平均值能很好地近似这种模式。在实验1中,参与者在多个环节中学习三种声音,并对原始声音样本以及通过对同一说话者发出的不同数量的不同元音(如[a]和[i])进行变形处理而创建的几个“说话者平均值”进行三选一的强制选择识别任务。在实验2中,相同的参与者对熟悉说话者发出的声音样本执行相同的任务。这两项实验表明,对于著名声音而言,识别表现会随着平均值中话语数量的增加而提高,反应时间会减少,但对于经过训练变得熟悉的声音则并非如此。这项研究揭示了熟悉声音的感知表征,并证明了平均值在识别熟悉声音方面的作用。说话者平均值捕捉到了说话者的独特特征,从而保留了识别所需的关键信息;它充当了说话者的原型。