Audiovisual identity perception from naturally-varying stimuli is driven by visual information.

Abstract

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-varying stimuli. In a between-subjects design, participants completed an identity sorting task with either dynamic video-only, audio-only or dynamic audiovisual stimuli. In this task, participants were asked to sort multiple, naturally-varying stimuli from three different people by perceived identity. We found that identity perception was more accurate for video-only and audiovisual stimuli compared with audio-only stimuli. Interestingly, there was no difference in accuracy between video-only and audiovisual stimuli. Auditory information nonetheless played a role alongside visual information as audiovisual identity judgements per stimulus could be predicted from both auditory and visual identity judgements, respectively. While the relationship was stronger for visual information and audiovisual information, auditory information still uniquely explained a significant portion of the variance in audiovisual identity judgements. Our findings thus align with previous theoretical and empirical work that proposes that, compared with faces, voices are an important but relatively less salient and a weaker cue to identity perception. We expand on this work to show that, at least in the context of this study, having access to voices in addition to faces does not result in better identity perception accuracy.