Dominance of face over voice in human attractiveness judgments: ERP evidence.

The attractiveness of a person, a complex, and socially relevant type of information, is transmitted in many ways, not least through face and voice. However, it is unclear how the stimulus domains carrying attractiveness information interact. The present study explored the audiovisual perception of attractiveness in a Stroop‐like paradigm using event‐related potentials (ERPs). Participants were presented with face‐voice pairs carrying congruent or incongruent attractiveness information and, in turn, judged the attractiveness level of each domain while ignoring the other. Voice attractiveness judgments were influenced by unattended face attractiveness, in terms of both, early perceptual encoding (N170, P200) as well as later evaluative stages (N400, LPC). In contrast, effects of unattended voice attractiveness on face attractiveness judgments were confined to early perceptual encoding (N170). These results demonstrate not only the interaction of multiple domains in human attractiveness perception at different processing stages but also a relative dominance of face over voice attractiveness. The present study is—to the best of our knowledge—the first to investigate the audiovisual perception of human attractiveness using ERPs. Here we provide behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for bi‐directional effects of face and voice attractiveness processing; nevertheless, the multisensory perception of attractiveness appears to show face dominance. This work provides novel information for understanding the audiovisual perception of human attractiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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