Intra- and Inter-racial Cross-modal Biometric Matching

Overview

Education Research Analyst: Pac South DSO Have you ever envisioned what face belongs to the voice at the other end of the phone? Or search the crowd for the person who looks like the voice you just heard? Th is study investigates into this seemingly impossible task of accurately matching stranger’s faces to voices through the angle of another phenomenon; the cross-race effect, or the tendency to be less likely able to distinguish between other-race faces due to less-robust neural encoding. This experiment tests the accuracy by which people can match same-race and other-race voices to the corresponding faces, to demonstrate how levels of experience influence our assumptions. In the current study, 104 American and Japanese participants listened to the voices of twelve Americans and sequentially matched them to one of the twelve faces shown, and then repeated with Japanese faces. Comparison of the accuracy of each nationality group as well as participant familiarity level produced some results indicating that a higher familiarity level may lead to enhanced ability to perform cross-modal biometric (face and voice) associations, though incongruencies with other results lead to intriguing conclusions such as the presence of a threshold of experience for making accurate cross- modal associations with unfamiliar stimuli. This study not only aids our understanding of the phenomenon we experience in everyday life, but also creates a gateway for future research on cross-modal associations by applying it to a larger demographic, with the potential to lessen the perceptual illusion of the “other-race effect” with regards to racial discrimination.

Competition history

• JSHS 2020 Category not listed

Resources

• National JSHS abstract book ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.