If your spouse ignores your voice in a crowd it's probably not because they can't hear you, most people have an uncanny ability to pick out their spouse's voice among a sea of other people.
Researchers also found humans can block out unfamiliar voices to zone in on the ones they know, a Queen's University press release reported.
Ingrid Johnsrude, a psychology professor at Queen's College, analyzed 23 married couples between the ages of 44 and 79, all of them had been married for at least 18 years.
Participants were asked to listen to two (or more) people speaking at the same time and repeat what one had said. The speakers varied, sometimes they were both strangers, other times one was the listener's spouse. Both speakers were the same gender and of similar age.
Patients were almost always better at reporting what their spouse had said.
People under the age of 60 were also better at understanding their spouse's voice if they were the "interrupting voice," and not the other way around.
"The benefit of familiarity is very large," Johnsrude said. "It's on the order of the benefit you see when trying to perceptually distinguish two sounds that come from different locations compared to sounds that come from the same location."
The researchers also found that while the ability to report an unfamiliar voice got worse with age, recognizing a spouse's voice remained constant. The ability to focus on a familiar voice was actually found to increase with age, Medical News Today reported.
Johnsrude said this study pinpoints a common problem for older people, which is that they find it difficult to hear what people are saying when there is background noise or other voices present.
"Our study identifies a cognitive factor - voice familiarity - that could help older listeners to hear better in these situations," Johnsrude said, according to Medical News Today.
