Nadine Lavan
Biographic Data
| ID | 2749530 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nadine Lavan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nadine |
| FAMILY NAME | Lavan |
| SIGNATURE | LAVAN N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen Mary University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7569-0817 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Can conceptual beliefs shape impressions from voices
When we hear a voice, we routinely form an impression of the speaker’s personality and characteristics. Previous work has primarily modelled first impression formation as a bottom-up, feed-forward process, where acoustic cues drive how different person characteristics, such as trustworthiness or competence, are perceived from unfamiliar voices. Contributions from top-down processes to impression formation, such as the influences of social stereot…
Self-recognition shapes evaluations of (self-) voice attractiveness
Hearing our own voice is commonly assumed to be an unpleasant experience. In contrast, some studies of voice perception have reported that we actually find our own voice to be more attractive than other voices. It remains however unclear whether previously observed enhancements of self-voice attractiveness were mediated by the recognition of the self-voice during the task, because recognition was never explicitly and rigorously examined in previo…
Making an impression: Participant-led voice synthesis reveals the acoustic signatures of trait impressions
Similarities in emotion perception from faces and voices: Evidence From Emotion Sorting Tasks
Emotions are expressed via many features including facial displays, vocal intonation, and touch, and perceivers can often interpret emotional displays across the different modalities with high accuracy. Here, we examine how emotion perception from faces and voices relates to one another, probing individual differences in emotion recognition abilities across visual and auditory modalities. We developed a novel emotion sorting task, in which partic…
Autistic adults form first impressions from voices in similar ways to non‐autistic adults
In everyday life, listeners spontaneously and rapidly form first impressions from others' voices. Previous research shows that, compared to non‐autistic people, autistic people show similarities and differences in how they evaluate others based on their faces. However, it remains unclear whether autistic people form first impressions from voices in the same way as non‐autistic people. We asked both autistic and non‐autistic listeners to rate an i…
Face and voice identity matching accuracy is not improved by multimodal identity information
Identity verification from both faces and voices can be error‐prone. Previous research has shown that faces and voices signal concordant information and cross‐modal unfamiliar face‐to‐voice matching is possible, albeit often with low accuracy. In the current study, we ask whether performance on a face or voice identity matching task can be improved by using multimodal stimuli which add a second modality (voice or face). We find that overall accur…
Human talkers change their voices to elicit specific trait percepts
The voice is a variable and dynamic social tool with functional relevance for self-presentation, for example, during a job interview or courtship. Talkers adjust their voices flexibly to their situational or social environment. Here, we investigated how effectively intentional voice modulations can evoke trait impressions in listeners (Experiment 1), whether these trait impressions are recognizable (Experiment 2), and whether they meaningfully in…
Idiosyncratic and shared contributions shape impressions from voices and faces
Voices elicit rich first impressions of what the person we are hearing might be like. Research stresses that these impressions from voices are shared across different listeners, such that people on average agree which voices sound trustworthy or old and which do not. However, can impressions from voices also be shaped by the 'ear of the beholder'? We investigated whether - and how - listeners' idiosyncratic, personal preferences contribute to fir…
How do we describe other people from voices and faces
When seeing someone's face or hearing their voice, perceivers routinely infer information about a person's age, sex and social traits. While many experiments have explored how individual person characteristics are perceived in isolation, less is known about which person characteristics are described spontaneously from voices and faces and how descriptions may differ across modalities. In Experiment 1, participants provided free descriptions for v…
Trait impressions from voices: Considering multiple 'origin stories' and the dynamic nature of trait-related cues
Experimental findings for trait impressions from voices are often discussed in relation to potential evolutionary origins. This commentary takes Sutherland and Young's (2022) account of the different potential origins of facial trait impressions to suggest that vocal trait impressions should also be viewed as having been shaped by cultural and individual learning
The effects of the presence of a face and direct eye gaze on voice identity learning
We rarely become familiar with the voice of another person in isolation but usually also have access to visual identity information, thus learning to recognize their voice and face in parallel. There are conflicting findings as to whether learning to recognize voices in audiovisual vs audio-only settings is advantageous or detrimental to learning. One prominent finding shows that the presence of a face overshadows the voice, hindering voice ident…
Does high variability training improve the learning of non-native phoneme contrasts over low variability training? A replication
Acquiring non-native speech contrasts can be difficult. A seminal study by Logan, Lively and Pisoni (1991) established the effectiveness of phonetic training for improving non-native speech perception: Japanese learners of English were trained to perceive /r/-/l/ using minimal pairs over 15 training sessions. A pre/post-test design established learning and generalisation. In a follow-up study, Lively, Logan and Pisoni (1993) presented further evi…
Audiovisual identity perception from naturally-varying stimuli is driven by visual information
Identity perception often takes place in multimodal settings, where perceivers have access to both visual (face) and auditory (voice) information. Despite this, identity perception is usually studied in unimodal contexts, where face and voice identity perception are modelled independently from one another. In this study, we asked whether and how much auditory and visual information contribute to audiovisual identity perception from naturally-vary…
The effect of familiarity on within-person age judgements from voices
Listeners can perceive a person's age from their voice with above chance accuracy. Studies have usually established this by asking listeners to directly estimate the age of unfamiliar voices. The recordings used mostly include cross-sectional samples of voices, including people of different ages to cover the age range of interest. Such cross-sectional samples likely include not only cues to age in the sound of the voice but also socio-phonetic cu…
Familiarity and task context shape the use of acoustic information in voice identity perception
Familiar and unfamiliar voice perception are often understood as being distinct from each other. For identity perception, theoretical work has proposed that listeners use acoustic information in different ways to perceive identity from familiar and unfamiliar voices: Unfamiliar voices are thought to be processed based on close comparisons of acoustic properties, while familiar voices are processed based on diagnostic acoustic features that activa…
How does familiarity with a voice affect trait judgements
From only a single spoken word, listeners can form a wealth of first impressions of a person's character traits and personality based on their voice. However, due to the substantial within-person variability in voices, these trait judgements are likely to be highly stimulus-dependent for unfamiliar voices: The same person may sound very trustworthy in one recording but less trustworthy in another. How trait judgements differ when listeners are fa…
Perceptual prioritization of self-associated voices
Information associated with the self is prioritized relative to information associated with others and is therefore processed more quickly and accurately. Across three experiments, we examined whether a new externally-generated voice could become associated with the self and thus be prioritized in perception. In the first experiment, participants learned associations between three unfamiliar voices and three identities (self, friend, stranger). P…
Please sort these voice recordings into 2 identities: Effects of task instructions on performance in voice sorting studies
We investigated the effects of two types of task instructions on performance on a voice sorting task by listeners who were either familiar or unfamiliar with the voices. Listeners were asked to sort 15 naturally varying stimuli from two voice identities into perceived identities. Half of the listeners sorted the recordings freely into as many identities as they perceived; the other half were forced to sort stimuli into two identities only. As rep…
How many voices did you hear? Natural variability disrupts identity perception from unfamiliar voices
Our voices sound different depending on the context (laughing vs. talking to a child vs. giving a speech), making within‐person variability an inherent feature of human voices. When perceiving speaker identities, listeners therefore need to not only ‘tell people apart’ (perceiving exemplars from two different speakers as separate identities) but also ‘tell people together’ (perceiving different exemplars from the same speaker as a single identity…
Impoverished encoding of speaker identity in spontaneous laughter
How many voices did you hear? Natural variability disrupts identity perception in unfamiliar listeners
Within-person variability is a striking feature of human voices: our voices sound different depending on the context (laughing vs. talking to a child vs. giving a speech). When perceiving speaker identities, listeners therefore need to not only "tell people apart" (perceiving exemplars from two different speakers as separate identities) but also "tell people together" (perceiving different exemplars from the same speaker as a single identity). In…
Flexible voices: Identity perception from variable vocal signals
Human voices are extremely variable: The same person can sound very different depending on whether they are speaking, laughing, shouting or whispering. In order to successfully recognise someone from their voice, a listener needs to be able to generalise across these different vocal signals ('telling people together'). However, in most studies of voice identity processing to date, the substantial within-person variability has been eliminated thro…
Similar representations of emotions across faces and voices
[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 17(6) of Emotion (see record 2017-18585-001). In the article, the copyright attribution was incorrectly listed and the Creative Commons CC-BY license disclaimer was incorrectly omitted from the author note. The correct copyright is "© 2017 The Author(s)" and the omitted disclaimer is below. All versions of this article have been corrected. "This article has been published under t…
Investigating the effects of caffeine on executive functions using traditional Stroop and a new ecologically-valid virtual reality task, the Jansari assessment of Executive Functions (JEF © )
How many voices did you hear? Natural variability disrupts identity perception from unfamiliar voices
Our voices sound different depending on the context (laughing vs. talking to a child vs. giving a speech), making within‐person variability an inherent feature of human voices. When perceiving speaker identities, listeners therefore need to not only ‘tell people apart’ (perceiving exemplars from two different speakers as separate identities) but also ‘tell people together’ (perceiving different exemplars from the same speaker as a single identity…
Trait impressions from voices: Considering multiple 'origin stories' and the dynamic nature of trait-related cues
Experimental findings for trait impressions from voices are often discussed in relation to potential evolutionary origins. This commentary takes Sutherland and Young's (2022) account of the different potential origins of facial trait impressions to suggest that vocal trait impressions should also be viewed as having been shaped by cultural and individual learning
How does familiarity with a voice affect trait judgements
From only a single spoken word, listeners can form a wealth of first impressions of a person's character traits and personality based on their voice. However, due to the substantial within-person variability in voices, these trait judgements are likely to be highly stimulus-dependent for unfamiliar voices: The same person may sound very trustworthy in one recording but less trustworthy in another. How trait judgements differ when listeners are fa…
Perceptual prioritization of self-associated voices
Information associated with the self is prioritized relative to information associated with others and is therefore processed more quickly and accurately. Across three experiments, we examined whether a new externally-generated voice could become associated with the self and thus be prioritized in perception. In the first experiment, participants learned associations between three unfamiliar voices and three identities (self, friend, stranger). P…
Please sort these voice recordings into 2 identities: Effects of task instructions on performance in voice sorting studies
We investigated the effects of two types of task instructions on performance on a voice sorting task by listeners who were either familiar or unfamiliar with the voices. Listeners were asked to sort 15 naturally varying stimuli from two voice identities into perceived identities. Half of the listeners sorted the recordings freely into as many identities as they perceived; the other half were forced to sort stimuli into two identities only. As rep…
The effects of the presence of a face and direct eye gaze on voice identity learning
We rarely become familiar with the voice of another person in isolation but usually also have access to visual identity information, thus learning to recognize their voice and face in parallel. There are conflicting findings as to whether learning to recognize voices in audiovisual vs audio-only settings is advantageous or detrimental to learning. One prominent finding shows that the presence of a face overshadows the voice, hindering voice ident…
Audiovisual identity perception from naturally-varying stimuli is driven by visual information
Identity perception often takes place in multimodal settings, where perceivers have access to both visual (face) and auditory (voice) information. Despite this, identity perception is usually studied in unimodal contexts, where face and voice identity perception are modelled independently from one another. In this study, we asked whether and how much auditory and visual information contribute to audiovisual identity perception from naturally-vary…
The effect of familiarity on within-person age judgements from voices
Listeners can perceive a person's age from their voice with above chance accuracy. Studies have usually established this by asking listeners to directly estimate the age of unfamiliar voices. The recordings used mostly include cross-sectional samples of voices, including people of different ages to cover the age range of interest. Such cross-sectional samples likely include not only cues to age in the sound of the voice but also socio-phonetic cu…
Investigating the effects of caffeine on executive functions using traditional Stroop and a new ecologically-valid virtual reality task, the Jansari assessment of Executive Functions (JEF © )
Flexible voices: Identity perception from variable vocal signals
Human voices are extremely variable: The same person can sound very different depending on whether they are speaking, laughing, shouting or whispering. In order to successfully recognise someone from their voice, a listener needs to be able to generalise across these different vocal signals ('telling people together'). However, in most studies of voice identity processing to date, the substantial within-person variability has been eliminated thro…
Similar representations of emotions across faces and voices
[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 17(6) of Emotion (see record 2017-18585-001). In the article, the copyright attribution was incorrectly listed and the Creative Commons CC-BY license disclaimer was incorrectly omitted from the author note. The correct copyright is "© 2017 The Author(s)" and the omitted disclaimer is below. All versions of this article have been corrected. "This article has been published under t…
Impoverished encoding of speaker identity in spontaneous laughter
How many voices did you hear? Natural variability disrupts identity perception in unfamiliar listeners
Within-person variability is a striking feature of human voices: our voices sound different depending on the context (laughing vs. talking to a child vs. giving a speech). When perceiving speaker identities, listeners therefore need to not only "tell people apart" (perceiving exemplars from two different speakers as separate identities) but also "tell people together" (perceiving different exemplars from the same speaker as a single identity). In…
How many voices did you hear? Natural variability disrupts identity perception from unfamiliar voices
Our voices sound different depending on the context (laughing vs. talking to a child vs. giving a speech), making within‐person variability an inherent feature of human voices. When perceiving speaker identities, listeners therefore need to not only ‘tell people apart’ (perceiving exemplars from two different speakers as separate identities) but also ‘tell people together’ (perceiving different exemplars from the same speaker as a single identity…
Please sort these voice recordings into 2 identities: Effects of task instructions on performance in voice sorting studies
We investigated the effects of two types of task instructions on performance on a voice sorting task by listeners who were either familiar or unfamiliar with the voices. Listeners were asked to sort 15 naturally varying stimuli from two voice identities into perceived identities. Half of the listeners sorted the recordings freely into as many identities as they perceived; the other half were forced to sort stimuli into two identities only. As rep…
Familiarity and task context shape the use of acoustic information in voice identity perception
Familiar and unfamiliar voice perception are often understood as being distinct from each other. For identity perception, theoretical work has proposed that listeners use acoustic information in different ways to perceive identity from familiar and unfamiliar voices: Unfamiliar voices are thought to be processed based on close comparisons of acoustic properties, while familiar voices are processed based on diagnostic acoustic features that activa…
How does familiarity with a voice affect trait judgements
From only a single spoken word, listeners can form a wealth of first impressions of a person's character traits and personality based on their voice. However, due to the substantial within-person variability in voices, these trait judgements are likely to be highly stimulus-dependent for unfamiliar voices: The same person may sound very trustworthy in one recording but less trustworthy in another. How trait judgements differ when listeners are fa…
Perceptual prioritization of self-associated voices
Information associated with the self is prioritized relative to information associated with others and is therefore processed more quickly and accurately. Across three experiments, we examined whether a new externally-generated voice could become associated with the self and thus be prioritized in perception. In the first experiment, participants learned associations between three unfamiliar voices and three identities (self, friend, stranger). P…
Does high variability training improve the learning of non-native phoneme contrasts over low variability training? A replication
Acquiring non-native speech contrasts can be difficult. A seminal study by Logan, Lively and Pisoni (1991) established the effectiveness of phonetic training for improving non-native speech perception: Japanese learners of English were trained to perceive /r/-/l/ using minimal pairs over 15 training sessions. A pre/post-test design established learning and generalisation. In a follow-up study, Lively, Logan and Pisoni (1993) presented further evi…
Audiovisual identity perception from naturally-varying stimuli is driven by visual information
Identity perception often takes place in multimodal settings, where perceivers have access to both visual (face) and auditory (voice) information. Despite this, identity perception is usually studied in unimodal contexts, where face and voice identity perception are modelled independently from one another. In this study, we asked whether and how much auditory and visual information contribute to audiovisual identity perception from naturally-vary…
The effect of familiarity on within-person age judgements from voices
Listeners can perceive a person's age from their voice with above chance accuracy. Studies have usually established this by asking listeners to directly estimate the age of unfamiliar voices. The recordings used mostly include cross-sectional samples of voices, including people of different ages to cover the age range of interest. Such cross-sectional samples likely include not only cues to age in the sound of the voice but also socio-phonetic cu…
How do we describe other people from voices and faces
When seeing someone's face or hearing their voice, perceivers routinely infer information about a person's age, sex and social traits. While many experiments have explored how individual person characteristics are perceived in isolation, less is known about which person characteristics are described spontaneously from voices and faces and how descriptions may differ across modalities. In Experiment 1, participants provided free descriptions for v…
Trait impressions from voices: Considering multiple 'origin stories' and the dynamic nature of trait-related cues
Experimental findings for trait impressions from voices are often discussed in relation to potential evolutionary origins. This commentary takes Sutherland and Young's (2022) account of the different potential origins of facial trait impressions to suggest that vocal trait impressions should also be viewed as having been shaped by cultural and individual learning
The effects of the presence of a face and direct eye gaze on voice identity learning
We rarely become familiar with the voice of another person in isolation but usually also have access to visual identity information, thus learning to recognize their voice and face in parallel. There are conflicting findings as to whether learning to recognize voices in audiovisual vs audio-only settings is advantageous or detrimental to learning. One prominent finding shows that the presence of a face overshadows the voice, hindering voice ident…
Human talkers change their voices to elicit specific trait percepts
The voice is a variable and dynamic social tool with functional relevance for self-presentation, for example, during a job interview or courtship. Talkers adjust their voices flexibly to their situational or social environment. Here, we investigated how effectively intentional voice modulations can evoke trait impressions in listeners (Experiment 1), whether these trait impressions are recognizable (Experiment 2), and whether they meaningfully in…
Idiosyncratic and shared contributions shape impressions from voices and faces
Voices elicit rich first impressions of what the person we are hearing might be like. Research stresses that these impressions from voices are shared across different listeners, such that people on average agree which voices sound trustworthy or old and which do not. However, can impressions from voices also be shaped by the 'ear of the beholder'? We investigated whether - and how - listeners' idiosyncratic, personal preferences contribute to fir…
Autistic adults form first impressions from voices in similar ways to non‐autistic adults
In everyday life, listeners spontaneously and rapidly form first impressions from others' voices. Previous research shows that, compared to non‐autistic people, autistic people show similarities and differences in how they evaluate others based on their faces. However, it remains unclear whether autistic people form first impressions from voices in the same way as non‐autistic people. We asked both autistic and non‐autistic listeners to rate an i…
Face and voice identity matching accuracy is not improved by multimodal identity information
Identity verification from both faces and voices can be error‐prone. Previous research has shown that faces and voices signal concordant information and cross‐modal unfamiliar face‐to‐voice matching is possible, albeit often with low accuracy. In the current study, we ask whether performance on a face or voice identity matching task can be improved by using multimodal stimuli which add a second modality (voice or face). We find that overall accur…
Can conceptual beliefs shape impressions from voices
When we hear a voice, we routinely form an impression of the speaker’s personality and characteristics. Previous work has primarily modelled first impression formation as a bottom-up, feed-forward process, where acoustic cues drive how different person characteristics, such as trustworthiness or competence, are perceived from unfamiliar voices. Contributions from top-down processes to impression formation, such as the influences of social stereot…
Self-recognition shapes evaluations of (self-) voice attractiveness
Hearing our own voice is commonly assumed to be an unpleasant experience. In contrast, some studies of voice perception have reported that we actually find our own voice to be more attractive than other voices. It remains however unclear whether previously observed enhancements of self-voice attractiveness were mediated by the recognition of the self-voice during the task, because recognition was never explicitly and rigorously examined in previo…
Making an impression: Participant-led voice synthesis reveals the acoustic signatures of trait impressions
Similarities in emotion perception from faces and voices: Evidence From Emotion Sorting Tasks
Emotions are expressed via many features including facial displays, vocal intonation, and touch, and perceivers can often interpret emotional displays across the different modalities with high accuracy. Here, we examine how emotion perception from faces and voices relates to one another, probing individual differences in emotion recognition abilities across visual and auditory modalities. We developed a novel emotion sorting task, in which partic…
Perception (21 works) · Psychology (21 works) · Cognitive psychology (20 works) · Social Psychology (15 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (12 works) · Communication (11 works) · Face Recognition and Perception (11 works) · Identity (music) (10 works) · Impression formation (7 works) · Social perception (7 works)