Question: What kind of experiments do you conduct?

Nadine Lavan answered on 8 Jan 2018:

Most of the time it boils down to playing human voices to my participants and giving them a task to do! Sometimes this happens just at a computer with headphones where participants will press buttons to respond (that’s called behavioural research), something I use MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) to measure the bloodflow in my participants’ brains to see which regions of the brain respond to my sounds – this is neuroimaging.

For example, I’ve run a behavioural study where I played people lots of pairs of voices and asked my participants to tell me whether the two sounds were made by the same or by two different speakers. The interesting thing in this study was that the two voices were sometimes both laughing, both saying “aah aaah aah” (vowels) and sometimes one voice laughed and the other said vowels. With that I wanted to test whether participants can still discriminate between voices when they are doing very different things (i.e. laughing or saying vowels). Turns out, they really can’t in they don’t know the people and even if they are reasonably familiar with the voices, they were still actually quite bad. That’s interesting because we usually just assume that we are good at doing something like telling two voices apart – which according to that study is not always true!