Abstract
Voices can convey information about a speaker. When forming an abstract representation of a speaker, it is important to extract relevant features from acoustic signals that are invariant to the modulation of these signals. This study investigated the way in which individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) recognize and memorize vocal identity. The ASD group and control group performed similarly in a task when asked to choose the name of the newly-learned speaker based on his or her voice, and the ASD group outperformed the control group in a subsequent familiarity test when asked to discriminate the previously trained voices and untrained voices. These findings suggest that individuals with ASD recognized and memorized voices as well as the neurotypical individuals did, but they categorized voices in a different way: individuals with ASD categorized voices quantitatively based on the exact acoustic features, while neurotypical individuals categorized voices qualitatively based on the acoustic patterns correlated to the speakers' physical and mental properties.
Highlights
Faces and voices are the most important social stimuli in the visual and auditory domains
The following statistic analyses were conducted in two ways: In one way, the results for the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) group were pooled together, and in another way, the results for the participants diagnosed as Asperger's syndrome (AS) and the results for the participants diagnosed as high-functioning autism (HFA) were processed separately while the results for the participants diagnosed as Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) were not included due to the small sample size (N = 2)
A t-test comparing the d-prime of gender discrimination for the participants in these two groups confirmed that their performance did not differ significantly (t(26) = 1.53, p = 0.138)
Summary
Faces and voices are the most important social stimuli in the visual and auditory domains. It has been proposed that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) might process faces in a different way, and a deficit in face recognition might lead to a deficit in social interaction and communication. Individuals with ASD tend not to look at the eye region of faces, their processing of the eye region is less effective than that of neurotypical (NT) individuals [1]. Individuals with ASD are found to perform worse than NT individuals in face memory tasks [2]. Because both faces and voices are processed in partially overlapping brain areas (in the superior temporal sulcus) and have similar developmental tracks, it has been suggested that facial and vocal information might be PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0129451. Because both faces and voices are processed in partially overlapping brain areas (in the superior temporal sulcus) and have similar developmental tracks, it has been suggested that facial and vocal information might be PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0129451 June 12, 2015
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