Perceiving a stranger's voice as being one's own: a 'rubber voice' illusion?

We describe an illusion in which a stranger's voice, when presented as the auditory concomitant of a participant's own speech, is perceived as a modified version of their own voice. When the congruence between utterance and feedback breaks down, the illusion is also broken. Compared to a b...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2011-04, Vol.6 (4), p.e18655-e18655
Main Authors: Zheng, Zane Z, Macdonald, Ewen N, Munhall, Kevin G, Johnsrude, Ingrid S
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation
Adolescent
Adult
Auditory Perception - physiology
Auditory stimuli
Biology
Computers
Feedback
Female
Fundamental frequency
Headphones
Humans
Monitoring systems
Motor task performance
Neurosciences
Perceptions
Phonetics
Physiology
Recognition
Rubber
Schizophrenia
Self-recognition
Signal processing
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Speech
Speech Acoustics
Speech motor control
Speech Perception - physiology
Studies
Voice
Voice - physiology
Young Adult
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Summary:We describe an illusion in which a stranger's voice, when presented as the auditory concomitant of a participant's own speech, is perceived as a modified version of their own voice. When the congruence between utterance and feedback breaks down, the illusion is also broken. Compared to a baseline condition in which participants heard their own voice as feedback, hearing a stranger's voice induced robust changes in the fundamental frequency (F0) of their production. Moreover, the shift in F0 appears to be feedback dependent, since shift patterns depended reliably on the relationship between the participant's own F0 and the stranger-voice F0. The shift in F0 was evident both when the illusion was present and after it was broken, suggesting that auditory feedback from production may be used separately for self-recognition and for vocal motor control. Our findings indicate that self-recognition of voices, like other body attributes, is malleable and context dependent.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0018655