The role of distinctiveness in person recognition from faces and voices

Objectives: When we recognize a familiar person, we can retrieve different kinds of information about her/him: semantic information (e.g. the person’s occupation), episodic information, such as a memory of a specific occasion on which this person has previously been encountered and lexical information (i.e. the name). Recent findings indicated that semantic and episodic information retrieval is more likely to be elicited following familiar face than voice recognition. The present study was designed in order to explore the potential role of stimulus distinctiveness as an underlying factor of the face advantage.
Design: The design included two within-subject factors: the stimulus domain (faces or voices) and the stimulus distinctiveness (distinctive or typical).
Methods: The proportions of episodic and semantic information recalled following the recognition of famous faces and voices was assessed, using an adapted version of the Remember/Know paradigm.
Results: In line with earlier results, more semantic and episodic information was retrieved from faces than voices. Moreover, semantic information was better retrieved from distinctive than typical stimuli. Nonetheless, distinctiveness impacted less than domain on the recall of semantic information, since more semantic details were retrieved from typical faces than from distinctive voices.
Conclusions: These results are discussed in the light of current models of person recognition.