EAGER: Characterizing the intrinsic memorability of voices

EAGER：表征声音的内在记忆力

• 批准号: 2329776
• 负责人: Wilma Bainbridge
• 金额: $ 20.4万
• 依托单位: University of Chicago
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-06-15 至 2024-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2329776&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: EAGER; Characterizing; intrinsic; memorability; voices

Voices are one of the primary ways in which we communicate, and they convey important information about the speaker, such as their thoughts and emotions. However, not all voices are created equal—some intuitively stick in our memories better than others. In the visual domain, previous research has found that despite all of our distinctive personal experiences, people tend to generally remember and forget the same faces, and so people’s visual memories are predictable to an extent. It is not yet known if the same is true for voices—whether voices have an intrinsic “memorability” that makes us universally remember some better than others. This project examines these open questions. Understanding what makes a voice easy to remember has resounding real-world applications. From designing learning materials, to creating voice assistants, understanding what makes a voice more memorable may be able to improve learning, memory and attention. By understanding what influences memory for voices, we also advance scientific knowledge about memory more broadly. For example, this research sheds light on whether or not there are similar principles across both vision and audition that determine what types of memories are preserved and discarded by our brains.Towards this goal, this project consists of three experiments to take place over a 15-month period. First, we test thousands of people’s memories for 630 diverse voices saying the same sentence, determining which voices emerge as the most memorable and forgettable, and if there are similarities across listeners in terms of what they remember. Second, we examine whether there are voices that are memorable or forgettable regardless of what they are saying. Third, we determine the features that make a voice memorable. Computational tools, that take in a voice recording and predict the chance someone will remember that voice, are being generated and made publicly available, and findings are being incorporated into an undergraduate textbook on Big Data in the Psychological Sciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

声音是我们交流的主要方式之一，它们传达了关于说话人的重要信息，比如他们的想法和情感。然而，并不是所有的声音都是一样的——有些声音比其他声音更容易在我们的记忆中留存下来。在视觉领域，先前的研究发现，尽管我们的个人经历各不相同，但人们通常倾向于记住和忘记相同的面孔，因此人们的视觉记忆在某种程度上是可预测的。目前尚不清楚声音是否也同样如此——声音是否具有内在的“可记忆性”，使我们普遍地记住一些声音比其他声音更好。这个项目探讨了这些悬而未决的问题。理解是什么让声音容易被记住，在现实世界中有着广泛的应用。从设计学习材料到创造语音助手，理解是什么让声音更容易被记住，可能有助于提高学习、记忆和注意力。通过了解影响声音记忆的因素，我们也在更广泛地推进了关于记忆的科学知识。例如，这项研究揭示了视觉和听觉是否存在类似的原则，这些原则决定了我们的大脑保留和丢弃哪些类型的记忆。为了实现这一目标，该项目包括三个实验，将在15个月的时间内进行。首先，我们测试了数千人对630种不同声音说同一句话的记忆，确定哪些声音最容易记住，哪些最容易忘记，以及不同听众在记忆方面是否有相似之处。其次，我们检查是否有令人难忘或容易忘记的声音，不管他们说的是什么。第三，我们确定使声音令人难忘的特征。人们正在开发计算工具，利用语音记录并预测某人记住该声音的可能性，这些工具正在向公众开放，研究结果正在被纳入《心理科学大数据》的本科教科书。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。