The own-age bias in age estimation of voices

Recently, it has been evidenced that age estimation performance may be influenced by an own-age bias, i.e. we can estimate more accurately the age of one’s own-age people than the age of other age people (George & Hole, 1995). To the best of our knowledge, all the studies that investigated the own-age bias used faces as stimuli. However, there are situations in which the voice is the only information available in order to estimate a person’s age (Cerrato et al., 2000). In the present study, the occurrence of an own-age bias in age estimation from voices was assessed by using an experimental design in which the age of participants (young vs old people) and the age of face stimuli (young vs old people) are crossed. Although we did not observe a crossed interaction where each age group would have been more accurate for in-group estimation than for out-group estimation, present results revealed the occurrence of an own-age bias in age estimation in younger adults only. Indeed young participants made smaller absolute errors than older participants when estimating the age of young voices. However, there was no significant difference between age groups when the age of older voices was estimated.