Phonagnosia sufferers are unable to recognize voices. Not even those of their own family.
The term phonagnosia refers to an inablity to recognize familiar voices or to discriminate between unfamiliar ones.
Researchers from UCL have reported the first known case of developmental phonagnosia in the journal Neuropsychologia, the case of a 60-year-old woman known as K.H., who says that she has been unable to recognize familiar voices for as long as she can remember.
K.H., an active and professional woman who works as a management consultant, told the researchers that she has always had severe difficulties recognizing familiar voices, even those of close relatives such as her daughter.
The case of K.H. sheds some light on the cognitive processes underlying voice recognition and auditory perception in general. Although K.H. could not recognize famous voices or discriminate familiar ones in the laboratory tests, she was able to perceive vocal expressions of emotions. Despite her voice recognition deficits, K.H. was still able to determine the sex of the speakers in the voice samples presented to her; furthermore, she performed as well as the controls on music perception tasks, and reported that she recognizes familiar songs (interestingly though, she usually cannot recognize specific singers).
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