Low is large: spatial location and pitch interact in voice-based body size estimation

Abstract

The binding of incongruent cues poses a challenge for multimodal perception. Indeed, although taller objects emit sounds from higher elevations, low-pitched sounds are perceptually mapped both to large size and to low elevation. In the present study, we examined how these incongruent vertical spatial cues (up is more) and pitch cues (low is large) to size interact, and whether similar biases influence size perception along the horizontal axis. In Experiment 1, we measured listeners' voice-based judgments of human body size using pitch-manipulated voices projected from a high versus a low, and a right versus a left, spatial location. Listeners associated low spatial locations with largeness for lowered-pitch but not for raised-pitch voices, demonstrating that pitch overrode vertical-elevation cues. Listeners associated rightward spatial locations with largeness, regardless of voice pitch. In Experiment 2, listeners performed the task while sitting or standing, allowing us to examine self-referential cues to elevation in size estimation. Listeners associated vertically low and rightward spatial cues with largeness more for loweredthan for raised-pitch voices. These correspondences were robust to sex (of both the voice and the listener) and head elevation (standing or sitting); however, horizontal correspondences were amplified when participants stood. Moreover, when participants were standing, their judgments of how much larger men's voices sounded than women's increased when the voices were projected from the low speaker. Our results provide novel evidence for a multidimensional spatial mapping of pitch that is generalizable to human voices and that affects performance in an indirect, ecologically relevant spatial task (body size estimation). These findings suggest that crossmodal pitch correspondences evoke both low-level and higher-level cognitive processes.

A house of cards: bias in perception of body size mediates the relationship between voice pitch and perceptions of dominance

“…About 75% of the explanatory power in height is lost when vocal-tract length is estimated from formant frequencies as opposed to measured in MRI. Even more of this explanatory power is lost when these formants translate into size assessments because of the interaction between fundamental and formant frequencies on size perception (Smith & Patterson, 2005), and other biases in height perception such as the "low is large" heuristic (Pisanski, Isenstein, Montano, O'Connor, & Feinberg, 2017), whereby playing low pitched voices closer to the ground makes them sound larger than when played from higher up in spatial location.…”

Exploring Group Differences in the Crossmodal Correspondences

“…Structural (or perhaps better said, physiological; Spence and Di Stefano, 2022, on this point), and some statistical correspondences (namely those based on the physical regularities of the environment), such as the pitch-size association, might well be expected to be universal (e.g., Gallace and Spence, 2006;Parise and Spence, 2009; see also Peters et al, 2015;Pisanski et al, 2017). That said, those statistical correspondences that happen to be based on more 'arbitrary' combinations of features (what Walker-Andrews, 1994, has termed 'Arbitrary and Artificial' correspondences), such as, for example, those that have been documented to exist between smell and taste stimuli (e.g., Blank and Mattes, 1990;Spence, 2008), and/or between colour and taste (e.g., Shankar et al, 2010;Spence et al, 2015), or between tastes and visual textures (Barbosa Escobar et al, 2022) are presumably more likely to show robust cultural variation.…”

Auditory Displays to Facilitate Object Targeting in 3D Space

“…As such, choosing sounds that match expectations is crucial to optimizing this information transfer. It has consistently been found that higher pitched sounds tend to be associated with more highly elevated objects, and that lower pitched sounds tend to be associated with lower objects [13,14,15]. This pitch-elevation mapping reflects a statistical regularity of acoustic scenes [16,17].…”