Effects of face and voice learning on access to semantic information from names.

Several studies showed that it is more difficult to retrieve semantic information from recognized voices than from recognized faces. However, earlier studies that investigated the recall of biographical information following person recognition used stimuli that were pre-experimentally familiar to the participants, such as famous people’s voices and faces. The present study was designed in order to allow a stricter control of frequency exposure with both types of stimuli (voices and faces) and to ensure the absence of identity cues in the spoken extracts. In the present study, subjects had to associate lexical (i.e., name) and semantic information (i.e., occupation) with faces or voices. Interestingly, when asked later to recall semantic information being cued by the person’s names, participants provided significantly more occupations for the targets that had been previously associated with faces than with voices. Moreover, participants’ performance was not significantly different when names and occupation were associated with voices compared with dog’s faces, whose complexity is similar to that of human faces, but for which we have poorer discrimination abilities. These results and their implications for person recognition models, as well as the potential role of the relative distinctiveness of faces and voices, are discussed.