Revsine Cambria, Goldberg Esther, Bainbridge Wilma A
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
Neuroscience Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
Nat Hum Behav. 2025 Apr;9(4):758-768. doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02112-w. Epub 2025 Feb 26.
Memorability, the likelihood that a stimulus is remembered, is an intrinsic stimulus property that is highly consistent across people-participants tend to remember or forget the same faces, objects and more. However, these consistencies in memory have thus far only been observed for visual stimuli. Here we investigated memorability in the auditory domain, collecting recognition memory scores from over 3,000 participants listening to a sequence of speakers saying the same sentence. We found significant consistency across participants in their memory for voice clips and for speakers across different utterances. Regression models incorporating both low-level (for example, fundamental frequency) and high-level (for example, dialect) voice properties were significantly predictive of memorability and generalized out of sample, supporting an inherent memorability of speakers' voices. These results provide strong evidence that listeners are similar in the voices they remember, which can be reliably predicted by quantifiable low-level acoustic features.
可记忆性，即刺激被记住的可能性，是一种内在的刺激属性，在人与人之间高度一致——参与者往往会记住或忘记相同的面孔、物体等。然而，迄今为止，这些记忆中的一致性仅在视觉刺激中被观察到。在这里，我们研究了听觉领域的可记忆性，收集了3000多名参与者在听一系列说话者说出同一句话时的识别记忆分数。我们发现，参与者对语音片段以及不同话语中的说话者的记忆存在显著的一致性。纳入低层次（例如基频）和高层次（例如方言）语音属性的回归模型能够显著预测可记忆性，并且在样本外具有泛化能力，这支持了说话者声音具有内在可记忆性的观点。这些结果提供了有力证据，表明听众在他们记住的声音方面具有相似性，并且可以通过可量化的低层次声学特征进行可靠预测。
