Autonomic responses to familiar faces without autonomic responses to familiar voices: Evidence for voice-specific Capgras delusion

It is more difficult to retrieve a familiar person's name and occupation from their voice than from their blurred face

“…They suggest that familiarity decisions are made by the PINs in a modality-independent manner, and also by a separate mechanism that signals familiarity by producing an elevated skin 838 HANLEY AND DAMJANOVIC conductance response (SCR) for familiar faces (Ellis, Quayle, & Young, 1999) and voices (Lewis, Sherwood, Moselhy, & Ellis, 2001). The findings from the two experiments reported here could be accommodated if, as Schweinberger and Burton suggest, familiarity decisions associated with elevated SCRs are generated by distinct modalityspecific processes for faces and voices.…”

Delusions: A suitable case for imaging?

“…This observation was reinforced by Lewis et al (2001) in a study of a woman who declared her son to be an impostor based upon his voice -i.e. the opposite signs from those revealed by Hirstein and Ramachandran's patient. Again, it may be surmised that functional imaging offers an excellent means of establishing how identity is normally established via faces and voices and how the processes can break down independently in different forms of the Capgras delusion.…”

“…reveal overt identification but not covert recognition. Normal individuals show reduced SCR to familiar compared with unfamiliar faces (Tranel and Damasio, 1985;Ellis et al, 1993), familiar voices (Reid et al, 1993;Lewis et al, 2001), familiar landmarks (Sherwood, 2004), but, interestingly, not familiar names (Ellis et al, 1999). Just what these phenomena signify is open to speculation, but it is widely accepted as indicating the registered significance/emotional familiarity of certain classes of stimuli.…”

“…(Capgras and Reboul-Lachaux, 1923). Capgras-type delusions for objects and voices have also been described (Ellis et al, 1996;Lewis et al, 2001). level, some facial information can affect either cognitive or autonomic activity.…”

In what sense ‘familiar’? Examining experiential differences within pathologies of facial recognition

“…Dalgalarrondo, Fujisawa, & Banzato, 2002;Reid, Young, & Hellawell, 1993) which suggests that the deficit in recognition is not restricted to faces and is therefore multi-modal. This has led Lewis, Sherwood, Moselhy, and Ellis (2001) to propose a voice recognition unit (VRU) which operates (mutatis mutandis) much like the FRU with connections to the PINs. It also suggests that double dissociations between modes of recognition can occur.…”