The Impact of Visual and Auditory Cues in Age Estimation

Several factors determine the ease and accuracy with which we can estimate a speaker's age. The question addressed in our study is to what extent visual and auditory cues compete with each other. We investigated this question in a series of five related experiments. In the first four experiments, subjects estimated the age of 14 female speakers, either from still pictures, an audio recording, a video recording without sound, or a video recording with sound. The results from the first four experiments were used in the fifth experiment, to combine the speakers with new voices, so that there was a discrepancy in how old the speaker looked and how old she sounded. The estimated ages of these dubbed videos were not significantly different from those of the original videos, suggesting that voice has little impact on the estimation of age when visual cues are available.