Familiarity may breed contempt, and it also makes it easier to ignore our nearest and dearest. The brain can focus on one voice in a noisy room. To find out if familiarity of the voice helps, Ingrid Johnsrude at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, recruited 23 married couples. Individuals were played two sentences simultaneously and asked to report back details about one of them, such as the colour and number mentioned. They did this correctly 80 per cent of the time when their spouse spoke the target sentence and a stranger spoke the decoy sentence. If strangers spoke both, the success rate dropped to 65 per cent.
展开▼
