title: You are only as old as you sound: auditory aftereffects in vocal age perception.
abstract: High-level adaptation not only biases the perception of faces, but also causes transient distortions in auditory perception of non-linguistic voice information about gender, identity, and emotional intonation. Here we report a novel auditory aftereffect in perceiving vocal age: age estimates were elevated in age-morphed test voices when preceded by adaptor voices of young speakers (∼20 yrs), compared to old adaptor voices (∼70 yrs). This vocal age aftereffect (VAAE) complements a recently reported face aftereffect (Schweinberger et al., 2010) and points to selective neuronal coding of vocal age. Intriguingly, post-adaptation assessment revealed that VAAEs could persist for minutes after adaptation, although reduced in magnitude. As an important qualification, VAAEs during post-adaptation were modulated by gender congruency between speaker and listener. For both male and female listeners, VAAEs were much reduced for test voices of opposite gender. Overall, this study establishes a new auditory aftereffect in the perception of vocal age. We offer a tentative sociobiological explanation for the differential, gender-dependent recovery from vocal age adaptation.
authors.affiliation: Department for General Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Institute of Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Am Steiger 3/1, D-07743 Jena, Germany. romi.zaeske@uni-jena.de
authors.forename: Romi
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Zäske
authors.forename: Stefan R
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Schweinberger
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology / Q000523:psychology; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D012737:Sex Factors; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors; D014833:Voice Quality; D055815:Young Adult