Auditory recognition expertise and domain specificity

Abstract

Auditory recognition expertise refers to one's ability to accurately and rapidly identify individual sound sources within a homogeneous class of stimuli. Compared to the study of visual expertise, the field of expertise in sound source recognition has been neglected. Different types of visual experts have been studied extensively both in behavioral and neuroimaging studies, leading to a vigorous debate about the domain specificity of face perception. In the present paper, we briefly review what is known about visual expertise and propose that the same framework can be used in the auditory domain to ask the question of domain specificity for the processing and neural correlates of the human voice. We suggest that questions like "are voices special ?" can be partially answered with neuroimaging studies of "auditory experts", such as musicians and bird experts, who rely on subtle acoustical parameters to identify auditory exemplars at a subordinate level. Future studies of auditory experts cannot only serve to answer questions related to the neural correlates of voice perception, but also broaden the understanding of the auditory system.