A model for person perception from familiar and unfamiliar voices

Abstract

When hearing a voice, listeners can form a detailed impression of the person behind the voice. Existing models of voice processing focus primarily on one aspect of person perception - identity recognition from familiar voices - but do not account for the perception of other person characteristics (e.g., sex, age, personality traits). Here, we present a broader perspective, proposing that listeners have a common perceptual goal of perceiving who they are hearing, whether the voice is familiar or unfamiliar. We outline and discuss a model - the Person Perception from Voices (PPV) model - that achieves this goal via a common mechanism of recognising a familiar person, persona, or set of speaker characteristics. Our PPV model aims to provide a more comprehensive account of how listeners perceive the person they are listening to, using an approach that incorporates and builds on aspects of the hierarchical frameworks and prototype-based mechanisms proposed within existing models of voice identity recognition.

Personality Perceptions from Voices and Faces – Impressions and Kernels of Truth

“…At the same time, leading researchers currently hold that there is little evidence that rst impressions from voices are actually linked to a speaker´s true personality. As a quali cation, it seems remarkable that current models of person perception from voices (e.g., Lavan & McGettigan, 2023) do not explicitly…”

“…Moreover, character traits are remarkably prevalent in spontaneous free descriptions of people from their voices (Lavan, 2023), linking them to the literature on spontaneous trait inferences (Uleman et al, 2008).At the same time, leading researchers currently hold that there is little evidence that rst impressions from voices are actually linked to a speaker´s true personality. As a quali cation, it seems remarkable that current models of person perception from voices (e.g., Lavan & McGettigan, 2023) do not explicitly…”

Vocal tract shape variation contributes to individual vocal identity in African penguins

“…Individual vocal recognition is also important for developing and mediating social relationships [9][10][11]. For example, human listeners can recognize familiar individuals by processing the spectral features of their voices [12,13]. More generally, in primates, small differences in the length, volume and shape of the supra-laryngeal cavities of the vocal tract can lead to small variation in formant patterns that contribute to the encoding of individual identity [14][15][16][17].…”

The time course of person perception from voices in the brain

“…Human voices are one such socially salient auditory signal. When we hear a voice, we hear a person such that listeners readily form complex impressions of that person behind the voice ( 1 – 3 ). These first impressions can be formed based on less than a second of exposure to an unfamiliar person’s voice.…”

“…In line with hierarchical models of voice perception ( 2 , 27 – 30 ), electrophysiological studies of person perception from voices often interpret early effects in the evoked responses to voices to reflect the processing of basic acoustic properties (~100 ms, 29 ), which is then followed by the processing of acoustic properties that are perceptually salient for a specific person characteristic (e.g., F0 and formant frequencies for gender perception, ~200 ms), and finally by higher-order processing and evaluation of the perceptual information (~400 ms). Empirical studies have indeed shown that gender perception becomes invariant to differences in voice fundamental frequency (F0; correlated with perceived pitch) by 170 ms after stimulus onset ( 16 ).…”