Comparing discrimination and recognition of unfamiliar voices

Abstract

This study compared listeners' abilities to discriminate among the remember the voices of 10 young male Californians, and examined the strategies listeners used in the two tasks. One group of listeners ( n = 24) judged whether pairs of voices represented the same or two different speakers; a second ( n = 100) heard a single voice and then tried to identify it in a “voice lineup” one week later. Signal detection analyses revealed no significant differences between discrimination and recognition accuracy. Both correct and incorrect “same” responses were more frequent for the voice discrimination task than for the recognition task. Multidimensional scaling analyses suggested that forgetting does not affect all voice “features” equally: some kinds of information were lost, while others were well-preserved over time. Comparisons of patterns of confusions for the two tasks supported the notion that voices are remembered in terms of a “prototype” and a set of deviations from that prototype, and that over time the deviations are forgotten so that identification responses converge on the most “typical” sounding voices.