The time course of person perception from voices in the brain

Resumen

When listeners hear a voice, they rapidly form a complex first impression of who the person behind that voice might be. We characterise how these multivariate first impressions from voices emerge over time across different levels of abstraction using electroencephalography (EEG) and representational similarity analysis (RSA). We find that for 8 perceived physical (gender, age, health), trait (attractiveness, dominance, trustworthiness), and social characteristics (educatedness, professionalism), representations emerge early (~80ms after stimulus onset), with voice acoustics contributing to those representations between ~100ms-400ms. While impressions of person characteristics are highly correlated, we can find evidence for highly abstracted, independent representations of individual person characteristics. For these abstracted representations, representations gradually over time. That is, representations of physical characteristics (age, gender) arise early (~120ms), while representations of some trait and social characteristics emerge later (~260ms onwards). The findings align with recent theoretical models and shed light on mechanisms underpinning person perception from voices.

Áreas y palabras clave

Cómo citar (APA 7)

Lavan, N., Rinke, P., & Scharinger, M. (2023). The time course of person perception from voices in the brain. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/cyus5