A surprising number of people are born with a problem recognising familiar voices

By Christian Jarrett You may have heard of face-blindness (known formally as prosopagnosia), which is when someone has a particular difficulty recognising familiar faces. The condition was first noticed in brain-damaged soldiers and for a long time psychologists thought it was extremely rare and primarily caused by brain damage. But in recent years they’ve discovered that it’s actually a relatively common condition that some (approximately two per cent of the population) otherwise healthy people are born with. Now research on the related condition of phonagnosia – an impairment in recognising familiar voices – is catching up. A new survey reported in Brain and Language, the largest of its kind published to date, estimates that just over three per cent of the population are born with phonagnosia, many of them probably without even realising it. Bryan Shilowich and Irving Biederman at the University of Southern California tested 730 people, mostly students, online. Before the voice recognition test began, the participants were first shown pictures of 100 named celebrities and had to say whether their voices were familiar to them. Many participants said they were familiar with all or nearly all the celebrities’ voices. The voices of the 50 most familiar celebrities were then chosen for the main voice recognition test. On each test item, the participants saw an array of either two or four celebrity faces and underneath were two 6-8 second clips of som...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Perception Source Type: blogs