The latest research regarding Super Recogniser and voice recognition has been published in French. A translation is below. For the article see:
They excel at recognizing faces and voices. These are the "super-recognizers"
Are you good at recognizing faces? And the voices? Some people are very good and others have a hard time. Researchers have actually found a great variation in the ability of people to recognize the faces or voices of people who are completely unknown to them.
When it comes to face recognition, abilities vary between those who have difficulty recognizing the faces of friends and family - a condition known as "prosopagnosia" or face blindness - and those who have demonstrated exceptional skills in recognizing unfamiliar faces, called “super-recognizers” or “super-physiognomists”.
These super scouts are often hired by many detective agencies, and by the police. In London, they are said to do a quarter of the identifications on their own.
A similar aptitude could also exist for speech recognition. What is known at the moment is that some people have difficulty recognizing the voices of their friends and own family. This condition is called "phonagnosia". However, the question of whether a person can possess exceptionally good speech recognition ability has not been investigated so far.
In a new study, we tested whether super face recognizers could transfer their abilities to voice recognition, in order to explore the possibility that there are also super voice recognizers.
Two distinct capacities
In general, to assess the ability levels of super-recognizers, researchers often used two tests. First, the Cambridge face memory test measures the ability to observe and remember a face. Next, the Glasgow face matching test is used to measure the ability to tell whether two faces belong to the same person or to two different people.
However, just being good at recognizing a face does not necessarily mean that a person is also good at comparing faces. Research has shown that even super-recognizers can have very good face memory, but be on par with participants with “normal” face comparison abilities and vice versa.
Voice tests have also been designed, not to measure super-recognition abilities, but rather to measure the general ability to remember a voice, and to detect whether two voices belong to the same person or to two different people. . But how well can super-recognizers perform well on voice tests? This has not yet been reviewed.
Super voice recognizers
In our recent study, we tested four groups of participants, based on their ability to memorize and identify faces. Participants took a voice memory test, a voice match test, and a celebrity voice ID test.
The study showed that speech recognition ability varies considerably more than what is found in current literature, which describes people by classifying them into two categories: typical or phonagnosic. We found that some participants were very good at speech recognition, beyond typical abilities.
Second, we found that those with exceptional face memory skills, face matching, or both, outperformed those with typical memory and voice matching skills.
Some participants managed to achieve consistently high scores on multiple tests. This suggests the possibility that there are indeed some super voice recognizers. However, more research is needed to substantiate this possibility.
Part of the reason is that the voice tests used were never originally designed to distinguish exceptional from very good, and therefore may be unable to fully explore higher abilities. of voice recognition. Thus, new voice tests specifically designed to focus on the upper end of the spectrum of speech recognition capabilities are needed.
Mechanisms of the brain
Our research suggests that there may be a link between these abilities and different mechanisms in the brain. These could be mechanisms of intermodality (voice and faces) and intertask (memory and perception) which, working together, lead to this type of superior capacity for recognizing voices and faces.
It is possible that these people could be useful in positions similar to those of super face recognizers, such as police and security forces. This is particularly relevant when voice clips are the only evidence available, such as in cases of telephone surveillance, kidnapping, fraud, blackmail and counterterrorism operations.
Our research is the first to explore the potential abilities of voice super-recognizers and consider whether those with exceptional face memorization, face comparison, or both skills can transfer their skills to voice testing.
It gives a first lead suggesting that people with excellent voice recognition skills might be able to improve police and security operations. The screening of people with such abilities could be a useful tool during the recruitment stages for this type of occupation.