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Voice cues are used in a similar way by blind and sighted adults when assessing women’s body size

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Version 2 2023-06-12, 08:45
Version 1 2023-06-09, 08:33
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-12, 08:45 authored by Katarzyna Pisanski, David Feinberg, Anna Oleszkiewicz, Agnieszka Sorokowska
Humans’ ability to gauge another person’s body size from their voice alone may serve multiple functions ranging from threat assessment to speaker normalization. However, how this ability is acquired remains unknown. In two experiments we tested whether sighted, congenitally blind and late blind adults could accurately judge the relative heights of women from paired voice stimuli, and importantly, whether errors in size estimation varied with task difficulty across groups. Both blind (n = 56) and sighted (n = 61) listeners correctly judged women’s relative heights on approximately 70% of low difficulty trials, corroborating previous findings for judging men’s heights. However, accuracy dropped to chance levels for intermediate difficulty trials and to 25% for high difficulty trials, regardless of the listener’s sightedness, duration of vision loss, sex, or age. Thus, blind adults estimated women’s height with the same degree of accuracy, but also the same pattern of errors, as did sighted controls. Our findings provide further evidence that visual experience is not necessary for accurate body size estimation. Rather, both blind and sighted listeners appear to follow a general rule, mapping low auditory frequencies to largeness across a range of contexts. This sound-size mapping emerges without visual experience, and is likely very important for humans.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

Scientific Reports

ISSN

2045-2322

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group

Issue

10329

Volume

7

Page range

1-6

Department affiliated with

  • Psychology Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-11-02

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2017-11-02

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-11-01

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