Do you sound or look as old as you are? A study of age estimation in young and older adults

Studies on age estimation usually indicated that people are fairly accurate at estimating the age of a person from her/his face or from her/his voice (with an absolute difference of five and ten years respectively) [e.g. Amilon et al., 2000, in: Speaker Classification II. Lectures Notes in Artificial Intelligence, C Müller, Berlin, Springer-Verlag]. However studies showed also that performance depends on the age of participants and the age of stimuli [Rhodes, 2009, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23, 1-12; Braun, 1996, Forensic Linguistics, 3, 65-73]. The aim of the present study is to compare age estimation performance from faces and voices by using an experimental design in which the age of participants (young vs older), the age of stimuli (young vs older) and the stimulus domain (face vs voice) were crossed. Overall, the age of faces was more accurately estimated than the age of voices. Moreover performance of age estimation was better for young stimuli than for older stimuli. Finally, young participants made smaller absolute errors than older participants. However there is no difference between young and older participants when estimating the age of older stimuli.