Characteristics of human voice processing

As human listeners, it seems that we should be experts in processing vocal sounds. Here we present new behavioral data that confirm and quantify a voice-processing advantage in a range of natural sound recognition tasks. The experiments focus on time: the reaction-time for recognition, and the shortest sound segment required for recognition. Our behavioral results provide constraints on the features used by listeners to process voice sounds. Such features are likely to be jointly spectro-temporal, over multiple time scales.