Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

In our daily life, we use and integrate information from both faces and voices to recognize other people. The cognitive mechanisms involved in this sensory integration process are often impaired in people with vision or hearing loss and in conditions such as Alzheimer's disease and dementia, which affect women at higher rates. Previous research has identified sex, gender, and sexual orientation-related differences in people's ability to recognize identities using faces, but it is unclear how these factors interact when recognizing identities using multisensory information from both the face and voice. In this study, we examined face-only, voice-only, and combined face-and-voice identity recognition across a balanced sample of heterosexual, gay, and lesbian females and males. Participants learned ten identities, which consisted of a face image paired with a 10-second voice clip, and completed recognition tests in each sensory modality. We found that females, regardless of sexual orientation, responded faster and more accurately than males in the face-only condition, and showed a greater advantage when face and voice information were combined. Furthermore, recognition ability was not linked to participants' gender self-concept. These findings aim to advance our understanding of how sex, gender, and sexual orientation-related factors may influence sensory processing and integration, which can inform more effective and equitable diagnostic, intervention, and social support across individuals based on their sex and gender profile.