title: Two cases of selective developmental voice-recognition impairments.
abstract: Recognizing other individuals is an essential skill in humans and in other species. Over the last decade, it has become increasingly clear that person-identity recognition abilities are highly variable. Roughly 2% of the population has developmental prosopagnosia, a congenital deficit in recognizing others by their faces. It is currently unclear whether developmental phonagnosia, a deficit in recognizing others by their voices, is equally prevalent, or even whether it actually exists. Here, we aimed to identify cases of developmental phonagnosia. We collected more than 1,000 data sets from self-selected German individuals by using a web-based screening test that was designed to assess their voice-recognition abilities. We then examined potentially phonagnosic individuals by using a comprehensive laboratory test battery. We found two novel cases of phonagnosia: AS, a 32-year-old female, and SP, a 32-year-old male; both are otherwise healthy academics, have normal hearing, and show no pathological abnormalities in brain structure. The two cases have comparable patterns of impairments: both performed at least 2 SDs below the level of matched controls on tests that required learning new voices, judging the familiarity of famous voices, and discriminating pitch differences between voices. In both cases, only voice-identity processing per se was affected: face recognition, speech intelligibility, emotion recognition, and musical ability were all comparable to controls. The findings confirm the existence of developmental phonagnosia as a modality-specific impairment and allow a first rough prevalence estimate.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany; International Max Planck Research School on Neuroscience of Communication, 04103 Leipzig, Germany. Electronic address: roswandowitz@cbs.mpg.de.
authors.forename: Claudia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Roswandowitz
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.
authors.forename: Samuel R
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Mathias
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, the Netherlands; International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, 6500 AH Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Florian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Hintz
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
authors.forename: Jens
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kreitewolf
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
authors.forename: Stefanie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schelinski
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany; Department of Psychology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, 12489 Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Katharina
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: von Kriegstein
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000377:Agnosia / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000235:genetics / Q000473:pathology; D001307:Auditory Perception; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany / Q000453:epidemiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D014831:Voice; D055815:Young Adult