Study Finds Some Voices Are Naturally More Memorable

“Memorability” describes how likely a stimulus—such as an object, face, or sound—is to stay in memory after someone encounters it. Recent psychological studies have explored whether some stimuli naturally stand out in memory, making them easier to recall than similar ones.

Researchers at the University of Chicago recently explored the memorability of voices, with their findings published in Nature Human Behaviour. Their study suggests that some voices are consistently more memorable than others and that this memorability can be reliably predicted across different listeners.

“Intrinsic memorability—patterns in what people remember and forget—is a relatively new but growing field in cognitive psychology,” said Cambria Revsine, the study’s first author, in an interview with Medical Xpress. “For the past decade, research has shown that people tend to remember the same images of faces, scenes, and objects. However, no previous study has examined the memorability of auditory stimuli.”

Since the brain processes static images and dynamic audio clips differently, the team aimed to determine whether some voices, like certain images, are inherently more memorable.

Predicting Voice Memorability

“We also wanted to predict how well participants would remember specific voices and identify the features that contribute to voice memorability,” Revsine explained. To investigate, the researchers used the TIMIT corpus, a large database of voice recordings from hundreds of U.S. speakers. Thousands of participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk completed a memory task, listening to voice clips of speakers reciting the same sentence.

Participants in the experiment listened to a series of audio clips featuring different speakers and pressed a key whenever they recognized a voice. The researchers then assigned each voice clip a “memorability score” based on how frequently participants remembered it on average.

Revsine and her team analyzed how consistently different groups of participants remembered or forgot the same voice clips. Their findings revealed significant consistency in memory performance across participants.

Key Acoustic and Cognitive Factors

To predict voice memorability, the researchers examined various acoustic features, including pitch, harmonics, and higher-level characteristics like dialect and perceived personality traits. They integrated these features into a computational model, which successfully predicted voice memorability based on factors such as pitch, loudness, tempo, and vowel production.

“Our study shows that people tend to remember and forget the same voices, regardless of individual differences in past experiences or attention levels,” Revsine explained. “Not only did participants consistently recall specific voice clips, but they also remembered certain speakers across multiple spoken sentences. We also found that certain acoustic properties—such as higher pitch and volume—enhance a voice’s memorability.”

These findings could improve our understanding of how voices are processed and stored in memory. They may also have practical applications, such as improving the reliability of “earwitness” testimonies in legal cases or enhancing the effectiveness of virtual assistants, podcasts, and audiobooks. In the long term, the insights could even lead to tailored audio materials or voice assistants designed to aid individuals with memory impairments.

The researchers now plan to explore whether a speaker’s memorability also influences how well listeners remember the content of their speech. Additionally, they aim to investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying voice memorability using techniques such as pupillometry and neuroimaging.

Read the original article on: Medical X Spress

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