Dhaka: As many as three in every hundred people may be unable to recognise the voices of people they know. New research suggests that 3 per cent of people surveyed couldn’t place a familiar voice, a condition called phonagnosia.
Their results showed that this inability to recognise familiar voices may be even more common than its more well-known visual counterpart, prosopagnosia, in which people are unable to recognise faces.
Because people are born with the condition, many may be unaware they have it.
Researchers at the University of Southern California carried out an online survey of 730 people, to see if they were able to recognise a range of well-known celebrity voices.
These celebrity voices were mixed with those of non-famous people of the same age, sex and regional accent.
Participants were asked to match the voice clips to headshots of celebrities they had previously said they recognised, based on their rating of 100 celebrity photos before the study.
Celebrities included George Clooney and his dulcet tones, nasal comedian and talk show host Jay Leno and lethargic actor John Cusack.
They were also asked to perform an imagination task, in which they had to recall common sounds and voices of celebrities.
On average, participants correctly matched the voice with its celebrity owner 76.7 per cent of the time, with men fairing slightly better than women.
As would be expected, those people who were more familiar with celebrity culture performed better, as did older participants.
But after the results were analysed, researchers found 3.2 per cent of people were wide of the mark.
This small proportion were more than twice as likely to deviate from the correct answer, than would be expected by chance – with a standard deviation of 2.28 compared to the expected 1.1.
From this pool of 23 people, the researchers indicate that they were likely born with an inability to recognise familiar voices, and that an inability to recognise voices, coupled with an inability imagine how the voices might sound to them, could be used as an indicator for the condition in clinical practice.
Writing in the journal Brain and Language, the authors explain: ‘This is largest survey ever conducted on the accuracy of the recognition of familiar voices to provide an assessment of the prevalence of phonagnosia.'
