Chemical-neuromorphic applied to artificial communication interface:social odor can create a mismatch with voice's gender

The recent technological development has allowed the use of communication mediums identifiable with the masculine, feminine, or very recent innovation, genderless. This allows the user of the communicative medium to project interactions of various levels and to represent the interlocutor through the voice-gender. The same kind of gender-related interaction is observed through entertainment technologies, serious games or through android robotics where the "form" of the robotic or virtual agent can manifest phenotypically gender-related characteristics. To date, no study has been carried out investigating gender- related odor when it is associated with a male or female voice, keeping control over shape and colour in the form of the communicative agent in order to avoid visual or tactile bias. On the basis of these assumptions we developed a research protocol in which the subjects had to listen narrations with male and female voices through communicative mediums (i.e., Hugvie), which were volatilized with chemical putative pheromones gender-related: Estratetraenol (X), 5α-Androst-16-en-3α-ol (Y) and with Vaseline Oil as control substance (Z). 20 healthy subjects (mean age 23 ± 2.4; 10 women) participated to the study. Main results of the research indicate a common trend between behavioural responses (co-presence effect) and psychophysiological responses, expressed in terms of cortical rhythms, in particular of alpha and delta. In the mismatch conditions of voice/social odor, the subjects seem to have greater preference/attention towards the social odor rather than towards the voice. The interaction of the social odor with the voice and the rhythms indicate a variation of Androsten in alpha, that increased in female voices (mismatch effect), versus a greater activation of delta and theta that increased in male voices. Another main interaction, due to the mismatch effect, can be seen in the increase of delta in Y during the listening of male voice.