People form impressions of others in milliseconds. Research on this process has focused almost entirely on what people see, such as faces, bodies, and clothing. I study how people perceive individuals and groups through sound.

I was trained in social vision, a field that integrates vision science and social cognition to understand how people perceive others through what they see. I quickly noticed that much of the same information is communicated through what people hear. I now integrate social cognition and auditory science (e.g., acoustics, linguistics, audiology, communication, cognitive neuroscience) to study what I call social audition.

This began with voice perception. Listeners hear someone and determine whether they are a man or a woman, old or young, a native or nonnative speaker, human or machine, all with social implications. However, I have since expanded to include how people socially perceive other sounds. Consider footsteps approaching from behind at night. From sound alone, people estimate whether the footsteps belong to a man or a woman, someone large or small, drunk or sober, in a rush or not. These inferences affect evaluations like threat, which in turn guide behavior, such as deciding whether to cross the street.

I am currently studying the auditory perception of protests and riots. Specifically, I am working with Canadian police services to test which auditory cues predict real and perceived violence in demonstrations and to improve the accuracy of intervention decisions.