Person recognition: 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). In the present study, subjects had to associate lexical (i.e., name) and semantic information (i.e., occupation) with faces or voices. 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. These results and their implications for current Interactive Activation and Competition person recognition models are discussed. Finally, the potential role of the relative distinctiveness of voices and faces is also considered.