Perception and memory of voices and faces

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One of the most fascinating parts of psychology is when our perceptions don't map onto the real world. My research has discovered that although we think tall people have low pitched voices, in reality, they do not. Much of my current research and the main objective of this grant is to study how we use voice frequencies (i.e. fundamental and formant frequencies) to help us judge how tall people are, and how this relates to our broader understanding of cross-modal correspondences. Forty years of research, shows that people associate low voice-pitched voices with larger body size, despite the fact that my recent meta-analysis shows that voice pitch has very little explanatory value for the height of same-sex adults. On the other hand, format frequencies, the resonant frequencies of the supralaryngeal vocal-tract are tied to body size and lower formants are correctly perceived as coming from larger individuals. When we hear people with low pitched voices, we know they are taller than people with higher pitched voices, but my research program shows that this knowledge is wrong at least half of the time when judging same sex adults. One of the goals of my research program and this grant is to try to understand why this happens. Based on the aforementioned priors, we would also expect that if we played a low pitched voice from a higher spatial location, the vocalizer would be perceived as larger than if from a lower spatial location. Our recent pilot data shows the opposite pattern, that low pitched voices are perceived as larger when projecting from a lower spatial location than a higher spatial location. This is highly consistent with research from cross modal correspondences that has long uncovered strong links between low frequency, low spatial location, and large objects. One of the goals of my research program and this grant is to integrate these two ideas to understand why spatial location has such a strong effect on size perception -that is contrary to the physical world. Further, relatively little is known about the relative influence of fundamental and formant frequencies on frequency-elevation mapping. My third goal is to determine how fundamental and formant frequencies work in isolation and together in frequency-elevation mappinng and size perception. Ultimately these experiments will help my research program understand how and why we use inappropriate and appropriate cues to body size when judging how large people are, and where they are in the world.