Nottingham researches have discovered people can accurately match someone’s voice to their face without ever meeting them.
Experts at Nottingham Trent University presented pictures of 18 faces and audio of 18 voices to a test group in a study.
The 47 participants were not told the faces and voices belonged to the same group of people.
Results showed people made similar judgements of how masculine, feminie, tall, healthy or over underweight they were – regardless of whether they just see their face, or only heard their voice.
Participants were also able to match the right face to the right voice 60 per cent of the time when asked if they belonged to the same person.
Test the findings for yourself: Listen to this audio recording of seven voices then look at the seven photos below – can you match them?
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Harriet Smith from the university said: “We are always making judgements about people based on how they look and how they sound.
“People talk to someone over the phone and build up an image of what they look like, for instance. We wanted to investigate how accurate this image is likely to be.
“We found that we make very similar judgements about people regardless of whether we see their face or hear their voice, and that it’s even possible to match the faces and voices of unfamiliar people.
“It’s possible that there could be an evolutionary explanation behind this.”
Experts will now examine whether the results could help police in cases where people hear but do not see a criminal – known as ‘earwitnesses’.
