Who is speaking? Cognitive and neural mechanisms of voice-identity processing

Human voice recognition is critical for social communication. However, the underlying mechanisms of voice-identity processing are relatively unknown so far. A valuable approach to unravel how voice-identity processing is accomplished in the human brain is to investigate people who have a selective deficit in recognising voices. Such a deficit has been termed phonagnosia. In this talk I will present findings from investigations on phonagnosia following brain damage (i.e. acquired phonagnosia) as well as phonagnosia cases without apparent brain lesion (i.e. developmental phonagnosia). We characterised the underlying cognitive, neural-functional, and neuro-anatomical mechanisms of phonagnosia by means of comprehensive behavioural testing, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and voxel-based lesion symptom mapping (VLSM). Our findings inform current models of voice-identity processing by (i) delivering novel evidence of brain regions that crucially contribute to voice-identity processing, and by (ii) emphasising the multistage nature of voice-identity processing. We showed that dysfunction at different cognitive stages results in behaviourally distinct phonagnosia subtypes