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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Sarah Knight
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
© 2020 The Authors. British Journal of Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Psychological Society. 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). Participants then made speeded judgements of whether voice-identity pairs were correctly matched, or not. A clear self-prioritization effect was found, with participants showing quicker and more accurate responses to the newly self-associated voice relative to either the friend- or stranger- voice. In two further experiments, we tested whether this prioritization effect increased if the self-voice was gender-matched to the identity of the participant (Experiment 2) or if the self-voice was chosen by the participant (Experiment 3). Gender-matching did not significantly influence prioritization; the self-voice was similarly prioritized when it matched the gender identity of the listener as when it did not. However, we observed that choosing the self-voice did interact with prioritization (Experiment 3); the self-voice became more prominent, via lesser prioritization of the other identities, when the self-voice was chosen relative to when it was not. Our findings have implications for the design and selection of individuated synthetic voices used for assistive communication devices, suggesting that agency in choosing a new vocal identity may modulate the distinctiveness of that voice relative to others.
Author(s): Payne B, Lavan N, Knight S, McGettigan C
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: British Journal of Psychology
Year: 2021
Volume: 112
Issue: 3
Pages: 585-610
Print publication date: 01/08/2021
Online publication date: 17/10/2020
Acceptance date: 22/09/2020
Date deposited: 04/12/2024
ISSN (print): 0007-1269
ISSN (electronic): 2044-8295
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12479
DOI: 10.1111/bjop.12479
PubMed id: 33068323
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