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When listeners hear a voice, they rapidly form a complex first impression of who the person behind that voice might be. We characterize how these multivariate first impressions from voices emerge over time across different levels of abstraction using electroencephalography and representational similarity analysis. We find that for eight perceived physical (gender, age, and health), trait (attractiveness, dominance, and trustworthiness), and social characteristics (educatedness and professionalism), representations emerge early (~80 ms after stimulus onset), with voice acoustics contributing to those representations between ~100 ms and 400 ms. While impressions of person characteristics are highly correlated, we can find evidence for highly abstracted, independent representations of individual person characteristics. These abstracted representationse merge gradually over time. That is, representations of physical characteristics (age, gender) arise early (from ~120 ms), while representations of some trait and social characteristics emerge later (~360 ms onward). The findings align with recent theoretical models and shed light on the computations underpinning person perception from voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We rarely become familiar with the voice of another person in isolation but usually also have access to visual identity information, thus learning to recognize their voice and face in parallel. There are conflicting findings as to whether learning to recognize voices in audiovisual vs audio‐only settings is advantageous or detrimental to learning. One prominent finding shows that the presence of a face overshadows the voice, hindering voice identity learning by capturing listeners' attention (Face Overshadowing Effect; FOE). In the current study, we tested the proposal that the effect of audiovisual training on voice identity learning is driven by attentional processes. Participants learned to recognize voices through either audio‐only training (Audio‐Only) or through three versions of audiovisual training, where a face was presented alongside the voices. During audiovisual training, the faces were either looking at the camera (Direct Gaze), were looking to the side (Averted Gaze) or had closed eyes (No Gaze). We found a graded effect of gaze on voice identity learning: Voice identity recognition was most accurate after audio‐only training and least accurate after audiovisual training including direct gaze, constituting a FOE. While effect sizes were overall small, the magnitude of FOE was halved for the Averted and No Gaze conditions. With direct gaze being associated with increased attention capture compared to averted or no gaze, the current findings suggest that incidental attention capture at least partially underpins the FOE. We discuss these findings in light of visual dominance effects and the relative informativeness of faces vs voices for identity perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Listeners spontaneously form impressions of a person from their voice: Is someone old or young? Trustworthy or untrustworthy? Some studies suggest that these impressions emerge rapidly (e.g., < 400 ms for traits), but it is unclear just how rapidly different impressions can emerge and whether the time courses differ across characteristics. I presented 618 adult listeners with voice recordings ranging from 25 ms to 800 ms in duration and asked them to rate physical (age, sex, health), trait (trustworthiness, dominance, attractiveness), and social (educatedness, poshness, professionalism) characteristics. I then used interrater agreement as an index for impression formation. Impressions of physical characteristics and dominance emerged fastest, showing high agreement after only 25 ms of exposure. In contrast, agreement for trait and social characteristics was initially low to moderate and gradually increased. Such a staggered time course suggests that there could be a temporo-perceptual hierarchy for person perception in which faster impressions could influence later ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When seeing a face or hearing a voice, perceivers readily form first impressions of a person's characteristics--are they trustworthy, do they seem aggressive? One of the key claims about trait impressions from faces and voices alike is that these impressions are formed rapidly. For faces, studies have systematically mapped this rapid time course of trait impressions, finding that they are well formed and stable after approximately 100 ms of exposure. For voices, however, no systematic investigation of the time course of trait perception exists. In the current study, listeners provided trait judgments (attractiveness, dominance, trustworthiness) based on recordings of 100 voices that lasted either 50, 100, 200, 400, or 800 ms. Based on measures of intra- and interrater agreement as well as correlations of mean ratings for different exposure conditions, we find that trait perception from voices is indeed rapid. Unlike faces, however, trait impressions from voices require longer exposure to develop and stabilize although they are still formed by 400 ms. Furthermore, differences in the time course of trait perception from voices emerge across traits and voice gender: The formation of impressions of attractiveness and dominance required less exposure when based on male voices, whereas impressions of trustworthiness evolved over a more gradual time course for male and female voices alike. These findings not only provide the first estimate of the time course of the formation of voice trait impressions, but they also have implications for voice perception models where voices are regarded as "auditory faces.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experimental findings for trait impressions from voices are often discussed in relation to potential evolutionary origins. This commentary takes Sutherland and Young's (2022) account of the different potential origins of facial trait impressions to suggest that vocal trait impressions should also be viewed as having been shaped by cultural and individual learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research suggests that familiarity with a voice can afford benefits for voice and speech perception. However, even familiar voice perception has been reported to be error-prone, especially in the face of challenges such as reduced verbal cues and acoustic distortions. It has been hypothesized that such findings may arise due to listeners not being "familiar enough" with the voices used in laboratory studies, and thus being inexperienced with their full vocal repertoire. Extending this idea, voice perception based on highly familiar voices-acquired via substantial, naturalistic experience-should therefore be more robust than voice perception from less familiar voices. We investigated this proposal by contrasting voice perception of personally familiar voices (participants' romantic partners) versus lab-trained voices in challenging experimental tasks. Specifically, we tested how differences in familiarity may affect voice-identity perception from nonverbal vocalizations and acoustically modulated speech. Large benefits for the personally familiar voice over a less familiar, lab-trained voice were found for identity recognition, with listeners displaying both highly accurate yet more conservative recognition of personally familiar voices. However, no familiar-voice benefits were found for speech perception in background noise. Our findings suggest that listeners have fine-tuned representations of highly familiar voices that result in more robust and accurate voice recognition despite challenging listening contexts, yet these advantages may not always extend to speech perception. We conclude that familiarity with voices is indeed on a continuum, with identity perception for personally familiar voices being highly accurate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity perception often takes place in multimodal settings, where perceivers have access to both visual (face) and auditory (voice) information. Despite this, identity perception is usually studied in unimodal contexts, where face and voice identity perception are modelled independently from one another. In this study, we asked whether and how much auditory and visual information contribute to audiovisual identity perception from naturally‐varying stimuli. In a between‐subjects design, participants completed an identity sorting task with either dynamic video‐only, audio‐only or dynamic audiovisual stimuli. In this task, participants were asked to sort multiple, naturally‐varying stimuli from three different people by perceived identity. We found that identity perception was more accurate for video‐only and audiovisual stimuli compared with audio‐only stimuli. Interestingly, there was no difference in accuracy between video‐only and audiovisual stimuli. Auditory information nonetheless played a role alongside visual information as audiovisual identity judgements per stimulus could be predicted from both auditory and visual identity judgements, respectively. While the relationship was stronger for visual information and audiovisual information, auditory information still uniquely explained a significant portion of the variance in audiovisual identity judgements. Our findings thus align with previous theoretical and empirical work that proposes that, compared with faces, voices are an important but relatively less salient and a weaker cue to identity perception. We expand on this work to show that, at least in the context of this study, having access to voices in addition to faces does not result in better identity perception accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans have a remarkable capacity to finely control the muscles of the larynx, via distinct patterns of cortical topography and innervation that may underpin our sophisticated vocal capabilities compared with nonhuman primates. Here, we investigated the behavioural and neural correlates of laryngeal control, and their relationship to vocal expertise, using an imitation task that required adjustments of larynx musculature during speech. Highly trained human singers and non-singer control participants modulated voice pitch and vocal tract length (VTL) to mimic auditory speech targets, while undergoing real-time anatomical scans of the vocal tract and functional scans of brain activity. Multivariate analyses of speech acoustics, larynx movements and brain activation datawere used to quantify vocal modulation behaviour and to search for neural representations of the two modulated vocal parameters during the preparation and execution of speech. We found that singers showed more accurate task-relevant modulations of speech pitch and VTL (i.e. larynx height, as measured with vocal tract MRI) during speech imitation; this was accompanied by stronger representation of VTL within a region of the right somatosensory cortex. Our findings suggest a common neural basis for enhanced vocal control in speech and song. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on within-individual modulation of vocal cues is surprisingly scarce outside of human speech. Yet, voice modulation serves diverse functions in human and nonhuman nonverbal communication, from dynamically signalling motivation and emotion, to exaggerating physical traits such as body size and masculinity, to enabling song and musicality. The diversity of anatomical, neural, cognitive and behavioural adaptations necessary for the production and perception of voice modulation make it a critical target for research on the origins and functions of acoustic communication. This diversity also implicates voice modulation in numerous disciplines and technological applications. In this two-part theme issue comprising 21 articles from leading and emerging international researchers, we highlight the multidisciplinary nature of the voice sciences. Every article addresses at least two, if not several, critical topics: (i) development and mechanisms driving vocal control and modulation; (ii) cultural and other environmental factors affecting voice modulation; (iii) evolutionary origins and adaptive functions of vocal control including cross-species comparisons; (iv) social functions and real-world consequences of voice modulation; and (v) state-of-the-art in multidisciplinary methodologies and technologies in voice modulation research. With this collection of works, we aim to facilitate cross-talk across disciplines to further stimulate the burgeoning field of voice modulation. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When presented with voices, we make rapid, automatic judgements of social traits such as trustworthiness—and such judgements are highly consistent across listeners. However, it remains unclear whether voice-based first impressions actually influence behaviour towards a voice's owner, and—if they do—whether and how they interact over time with the voice owner's observed actions to further influence the listener's behaviour. This study used an investment game paradigm to investigate (1) whether voices judged to differ in relevant social traits accrued different levels of investment and/or (2) whether first impressions of the voices interacted with the behaviour of their apparent owners to influence investments over time. Results show that participants were responding to their partner's behaviour. Crucially, however, there were no effects of voice. These findings suggest that, at least under some conditions, social traits perceived from the voice alone may not influence trusting behaviours in the context of a virtual interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human faces and voices are rich sources of information that can vary in many different ways. Most of the literature on face/voice perception has focused on understanding how people look and sound different to each other (between-person variability). However, recent studies highlight the ways in which the same person can look and sound different on different occasions (within-person variability). Across three experiments, we examined how within- and between-person variability relate to one another for social trait impressions by collecting trait ratings attributed to multiple face images and voice recordings of the same people. We find that within-person variability in social trait evaluations is at least as great as between-person variability. Using different stimulus sets across experiments, trait impressions of voices are consistently more variable within people than between people--a pattern that is only evident occasionally when judging faces. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding within-person variability, showing how judgments of the same person can vary widely on different encounters and quantify how this pattern differs for voice and face perception. The work consequently has implications for theoretical models proposing that voices can be considered "auditory faces" and imposes limitations to the "kernel of truth" hypothesis of trait evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information associated with the self is prioritized relative to information associated with others and is therefore processed more quickly and accurately. Across three experiments, we examined whether a new externally‐generated voice could become associated with the self and thus be prioritized in perception. In the first experiment, participants learned associations between three unfamiliar voices and three identities (self, friend, stranger). Participants then made speeded judgements of whether voice‐identity pairs were correctly matched, or not. A clear self‐prioritization effect was found, with participants showing quicker and more accurate responses to the newly self‐associated voice relative to either the friend‐ or stranger‐ voice. In two further experiments, we tested whether this prioritization effect increased if the self‐voice was gender‐matched to the identity of the participant (Experiment 2) or if the self‐voice was chosen by the participant (Experiment 3). Gender‐matching did not significantly influence prioritization; the self‐voice was similarly prioritized when it matched the gender identity of the listener as when it did not. However, we observed that choosing the self‐voice did interact with prioritization (Experiment 3); the self‐voice became more prominent, via lesser prioritization of the other identities, when the self‐voice was chosen relative to when it was not. Our findings have implications for the design and selection of individuated synthetic voices used for assistive communication devices, suggesting that agency in choosing a new vocal identity may modulate the distinctiveness of that voice relative to others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From only a single spoken word, listeners can form a wealth of first impressions of a person's character traits and personality based on their voice. However, due to the substantial within‐person variability in voices, these trait judgements are likely to be highly stimulus‐dependent for unfamiliar voices: The same person may sound very trustworthy in one recording but less trustworthy in another. How trait judgements differ when listeners are familiar with a voice is unclear: Are listeners who are familiar with the voices as susceptible to the effects of within‐person variability? Does the semantic knowledge listeners have about a familiar person influence their judgements? In the current study, we tested the effect of familiarity on listeners' trait judgements from variable voices across 3 experiments. Using a between‐subjects design, we contrasted trait judgements by listeners who were familiar with a set of voices – either through laboratory‐based training or through watching a TV show – with listeners who were unfamiliar with the voices. We predicted that familiarity with the voices would reduce variability in trait judgements for variable voice recordings from the same identity (cf. Mileva, Kramer & Burton, Perception, 48, 471 and 2019, for faces). However, across the 3 studies and two types of measures to assess variability, we found no compelling evidence to suggest that trait impressions were systematically affected by familiarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity sorting tasks, in which participants sort multiple naturally varying stimuli of usually two identities into perceived identities, have recently gained popularity in voice and face processing research. In both modalities, participants who are unfamiliar with the identities tend to perceive multiple stimuli of the same identity as different people and thus fail to "tell people together." These similarities across modalities suggest that modality-general mechanisms may underpin sorting behaviour. In this study, participants completed a voice sorting and a face sorting task. Taking an individual differences approach, we asked whether participants' performance on voice and face sorting of unfamiliar identities is correlated. Participants additionally completed a voice discrimination (Bangor Voice Matching Test) and a face discrimination task (Glasgow Face Matching Test). Using these tasks, we tested whether performance on sorting related to explicit identity discrimination. Performance on voice sorting and face sorting tasks was correlated, suggesting that common modality-general processes underpin these tasks. However, no significant correlations were found between sorting and discrimination performance, with the exception of significant relationships for performance on "same identity" trials with "telling people together" for voices and faces. Overall, any reported relationships were however relatively weak, suggesting the presence of additional modality-specific and task-specific processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the effects of two types of task instructions on performance on a voice sorting task by listeners who were either familiar or unfamiliar with the voices. Listeners were asked to sort 15 naturally varying stimuli from two voice identities into perceived identities. Half of the listeners sorted the recordings freely into as many identities as they perceived; the other half were forced to sort stimuli into two identities only. As reported in previous studies, unfamiliar listeners formed more clusters than familiar listeners. Listeners therefore perceived different naturally varying stimuli from the same identity as coming from different identities, while being highly accurate at telling apart the stimuli from different voices. We further show that a change in task instructions – forcing listeners to sort stimuli into two identities only – helped unfamiliar listeners to overcome this selective failure at 'telling people together'. This improvement, however, came at the cost of an increase in errors in telling people apart. For familiar listeners, similar non‐significant trends were apparent. Therefore, even when informed about correct number of identities, listeners may fail to accurately perceive identity further highlighting that voice identity perception in the context of natural within‐person variability is a challenging task. We discuss our results in terms of similarities and differences to findings in the face perception literature and their importance in applied settings, such as forensic voice identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an investigation of the perception of authenticity in audiovisual laughter, in which we contrast spontaneous and volitional samples and examine the contributions of unimodal affective information to multimodal percepts. In a pilot study, we demonstrate that listeners perceive spontaneous laughs as more authentic than volitional ones, both in unimodal (audio-only, visual-only) and multimodal contexts (audiovisual). In the main experiment, we show that the discriminability of volitional and spontaneous laughter is enhanced for multimodal laughter. Analyses of relationships between affective ratings and the perception of authenticity show that, while both unimodal percepts significantly predict evaluations of audiovisual laughter, it is auditory affective cues that have the greater influence on multimodal percepts. We discuss differences and potential mismatches in emotion signalling through voices and faces, in the context of spontaneous and volitional behaviour, and highlight issues that should be addressed in future studies of dynamic multimodal emotion processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human voice is a highly flexible instrument for self-expression, yet voice identity perception is largely studied using controlled speech recordings. Using two voice-sorting tasks with naturally varying stimuli, we compared the performance of listeners who were familiar and unfamiliar with the TV show Breaking Bad. Listeners organised audio clips of speech with (1) low-expressiveness and (2) high-expressiveness into perceived identities. We predicted that increased expressiveness (e.g., shouting, strained voice) would significantly impair performance. Overall, while unfamiliar listeners were less able to generalise identity across exemplars, the two groups performed equivalently well when telling voices apart when dealing with low-expressiveness stimuli. However, high vocal expressiveness significantly impaired telling apart in both the groups: this led to increased misidentifications, where sounds from one character were assigned to the other. These misidentifications were highly consistent for familiar listeners but less consistent for unfamiliar listeners. Our data suggest that vocal flexibility has powerful effects on identity perception, where changes in the acoustic properties of vocal signals introduced by expressiveness lead to effects apparent in familiar and unfamiliar listeners alike. At the same time, expressiveness appears to have affected other aspects of voice identity processing selectively in one listener group but not the other, thus revealing complex interactions of stimulus properties and listener characteristics (i.e., familiarity) in identity processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our voices sound different depending on the context (laughing vs. talking to a child vs. giving a speech), making within‐person variability an inherent feature of human voices. When perceiving speaker identities, listeners therefore need to not only 'tell people apart' (perceiving exemplars from two different speakers as separate identities) but also 'tell people together' (perceiving different exemplars from the same speaker as a single identity). In the current study, we investigated how such natural within‐person variability affects voice identity perception. Using voices from a popular TV show, listeners, who were either familiar or unfamiliar with this show, sorted naturally varying voice clips from two speakers into clusters to represent perceived identities. Across three independent participant samples, unfamiliar listeners perceived more identities than familiar listeners and frequently mistook exemplars from the same speaker to be different identities. These findings point towards a selective failure in 'telling people together'. Our study highlights within‐person variability as a key feature of voices that has striking effects on (unfamiliar) voice identity perception. Our findings not only open up a new line of enquiry in the field of voice perception but also call for a re‐evaluation of theoretical models to account for natural variability during identity perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2 behavioral experiments, we explored how the extraction of identity-related information from familiar and unfamiliar voices is affected by naturally occurring vocal flexibility and variability, introduced by different types of vocalizations and levels of volitional control during production. In a first experiment, participants performed a speaker discrimination task on vowels, volitional (acted) laughter, and spontaneous (authentic) laughter from 5 unfamiliar speakers. We found that performance was significantly impaired for spontaneous laughter, a vocalization produced under reduced volitional control. We additionally found that the detection of identity-related information fails to generalize across different types of nonverbal vocalizations (e.g., laughter vs. vowels) and across mismatches in volitional control within vocalization pairs (e.g., volitional laughter vs. spontaneous laughter), with performance levels indicating an inability to discriminate between speakers. In a second experiment, we explored whether personal familiarity with the speakers would afford greater accuracy and better generalization of identity perception. Using new stimuli, we largely replicated our previous findings: whereas familiarity afforded a consistent performance advantage for speaker discriminations, the experimental manipulations impaired performance to similar extents for familiar and unfamiliar listener groups. We discuss our findings with reference to prototype-based models of voice processing and suggest potential underlying mechanisms and representations of familiar and unfamiliar voice perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When talkers speak in masking sounds, their speech undergoes a variety of acoustic and phonetic changes. These changes are known collectively as the Lombard effect. Most behavioural research and neuroimaging research in this area has concentrated on the effect of energetic maskers such as white noise on Lombard speech. Previous fMRI studies have argued that neural responses to speaking in noise are driven by the quality of auditory feedback--that is, the audibility of the speaker's voice over the masker. However, we also frequently produce speech in the presence of informational maskers such as another talker. Here, speakers read sentences over a range of maskers varying in their informational and energetic content: speech, rotated speech, speech modulated noise, and white noise. Subjects also spoke in quiet and listened to the maskers without speaking. When subjects spoke in masking sounds, their vocal intensity increased in line with the energetic content of the masker. However, the opposite pattern was found neurally. In the superior temporal gyrus, activation was most strongly associated with increases in informational, rather than energetic, masking. This suggests that the neural activations associated with speaking in noise are more complex than a simple feedback response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synchronized behavior (chanting, singing, praying, dancing) is found in all human cultures and is central to religious, military, and political activities, which require people to act collaboratively and cohesively; however, we know little about the neural underpinnings of many kinds of synchronous behavior (e.g., vocal behavior) or its role in establishing and maintaining group cohesion. In the present study, we measured neural activity using fMRI while participants spoke simultaneously with another person. We manipulated whether the couple spoke the same sentence (allowing synchrony) or different sentences (preventing synchrony), and also whether the voice the participant heard was "live" (allowing rich reciprocal interaction) or prerecorded (with no such mutual influence). Synchronous speech was associated with increased activity in posterior and anterior auditory fields. When, and only when, participants spoke with a partner who was both synchronous and "live," we observed a lack of the suppression of auditory cortex, which is commonly seen as a neural correlate of speech production. Instead, auditory cortex responded as though it were processing another talker's speech. Our results suggest that detecting synchrony leads to a change in the perceptual consequences of one'sownactions: they are processed as though they were other-, rather than self-produced. This may contribute to our understanding of synchronized behavior as a group-bonding tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established that categorising the emotional content of facial expressions may differ depending on contextual information. Whether this malleability is observed in the auditory domain and in genuine emotion expressions is poorly explored. We examined the perception of authentic laughter and crying in the context of happy, neutral and sad facial expressions. Participants rated the vocalisations on separate unipolar scales of happiness and sadness and on arousal. Although they were instructed to focus exclusively on the vocalisations, consistent context effects were found: For both laughter and crying, emotion judgements were shifted towards the information expressed by the face. These modulations were independent of response latencies and were larger for more emotionally ambiguous vocalisations. No effects of context were found for arousal ratings. These findings suggest that the automatic encoding of contextual information during emotion perception generalises across modalities, to purely non-verbal vocalisations, and is not confined to acted expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on a study about vocal emotions and communication, highlighting several significant signals which are considered crucial for a complete understanding of vocal emotions including nonverbal vocalizations which include laughter, sobs, and screams. Information concerning various steps in the processing of vocal emotions is presented. Details about bilateral auditory cortices as well as neuroimaging data are mentioned.

Misalignment between second language (L2) self-perception and actual ability is often observed among L2 learners. In order to further understand this phenomenon, the current study investigated how the roles of individual differences (IDs; especially experiential and cognitive IDs) influence the learners' self-assessment accuracy. To this end, L2 speech samples elicited from 97 Japanese learners of English were analyzed via self-evaluation and expert evaluations. Subsequently, learners' IDs profiles, including working memory, phonological memory, implicit learning and auditory processing, were linked to (a) the gap between self- and expert evaluation scores and (b) the type of inaccurate self-evaluation (i.e., overconfident vs. underconfident evaluations). The study illustrates the complex relationships between L2 learners' linguistic knowledge, cognitive abilities, experiential profiles and self-perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]