Cognitive and Psychophysical Determinants of Voice Recognition

Voice recognition is a fundamental pathway to person individuation, although typically overshadowed by its visual counterpart, face recognition. There have been no large scale, parametric studies investigating voice recognition performance as a function of cognitive variables in concert with voice parameters. Using celebrity voice clips of varying lengths, 1-4 sec., paired with similar sounding, unfamiliar voice foils, the present study investigated three key voice parameters distinguishing targets from foils -- fundamental frequency, f0 (pitch), subharmonic-to-harmonic ratio, SHR (creakiness), and syllabic rate--in concert with the cognitive variables of voice familiarity and judged voice distinctiveness as they contributed to recognition accuracy at varying clip lengths. All the variables had robust effects in clips as short as 1 sec. Objective measures of distinctiveness, quantified by the distances of each target voice to that target’s sex- based mean for each parameter, showed that sensitivity to distinctiveness increased with familiarity. This effect was most evident on foil trials; at clip lengths of one second and above, f0 and SHR distinctiveness showed no discernible effect on match trials. Speaking rate distinctiveness improved match accuracy, an effect only seen with high familiarity. Recognition accuracy improved with the number of parameters that differed by an amount larger than the median, both in the target-to-foil and target-to-mean voice comparisons. A linear regression model of these three voice parameters, clip length, and subjective measures of distinctiveness and familiarity accounted for 36.7% of the variance in recognition accuracy.