City Research Online

Abstract

The human voice is highly flexible, allowing for diverse expression during communication, but presenting perceptual challenges through large acoustic variability. The ability to recognise an individual person’s voice depends on the listener’s ability to overcome this within-speaker variability to extract a single identity percept (“telling together”). Previous work has found that this process is greatly assisted by familiarity, with evidence suggesting that more extensive and varied exposure to a voice is associated with the formation of a more robust mental representation of it. Here, we used functional MRI with Representational Similarity Analysis to characterise how personal familiarity with a voice is reflected in neural representations. We measured and compared brain responses to voices of differing familiarity - a personally-familiar other, a voice familiarised through lab training, and a new (untrained) voice – while listeners identified those voices from naturally-varying, spontaneous speech clips. Personally-familiar voices elicited brain response patterns in voice-, face-, and person-selective cortex showing higher within- and between-speaker dissimilarity, compared to lower-familiarity lab-trained and untrained voices. This indicated that representations for the sounds of personally-familiar voices are better resolved from each other in the brain, and aligns with other research reporting intelligibility advantages for speech produced by familiar talkers. Overall, our findings suggest that the extensive and varied exposure to personally-familiar voices results in the development of finer-grained representations of those voices, which cannot be achieved via short-term lab training.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article has been accepted for publication in Current Biology by Cell Press and it will be available online at: www.cell.com/current-biology/home
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Departments:	School of Health & Medical Sciences School of Health & Medical Sciences > Psychology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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