The Social Life of Voices: Studying the perception and production of vocal identity and traits


If you would like to attend the meeting, please contact Zoe Woodhead at zoe.woodhead@psy.ox.ac.uk for the link.

The human voice is an essentially social signal, yet it is mainly studied as a channel for linguistic communication. My lab’s research aims to redress this imbalance in the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience, through a programme of research that investigates voices as auditory representations of the self and other people. In my talk, I will give an overview of this ongoing work. I will describe our findings on voice perception, concerning how we recognize and discriminate identity from voices, how identities are learned, and the differences between familiar and unfamiliar voice processing. I will also give examples of how explicit and implicit evaluations of vocal traits and personality are (not) influenced by listener knowledge and talker characteristics. Finally, I will introduce some of our work on voice production and ownership, using examples from recent studies of volitional trait expression and self-voice biases in perception.