Abstract
ABSTRACTAlthough faces and voices are important sources of information for person recognition, it is unclear whether these cues interact at a late stage to act as complementary, unimodal sources for person perception or whether they are integrated early on to provide a multisensory representation of a person in memory. Here we used a crossmodal associative priming paradigm to test whether unfamiliar voices which were recently paired with unfamiliar faces could subsequently prime familiarity decisions to the related faces. Based on our previous study, we also predicted that distinctive voices would enhance the recognition of faces relative to typical voices. In Experiment 1 we found that voice primes facilitated the recognition of related target faces at test relative to learned but unrelated voice primes. Furthermore, face recognition was enhanced by the distinctiveness of the paired voice primes. In contrast, we found no evidence of priming with arbitrary sounds (Experiment 2), confirming the special status of the pairing between voices and faces for person identification. In Experiment 3, we established that voice primes relative to no prime facilitated familiarity decisions to related faces. Our results suggest a strong association between newly learned voices and faces in memory. Furthermore, the distinctiveness effect found for voice primes on face recognition suggests that the quality of the voice can affect memory for faces. Our findings are discussed with regard to existing models of person perception and argue for interactions between voices and faces that converge early in a multisensory representation of persons in long-term memory.
Highlights
There have been significant advances made in our understanding of how both familiar and unfamiliar faces are recognized, and the cognitive and neural mechanisms supporting face perception, it is unclear how other sources of cross-modal information contribute to person perception
We found that unfamiliar faces, which had been previously paired with distinctive voices during a learning session, were subsequently better remembered than faces learned with a typical voice, no such benefit was found with non-vocal sounds
We set up a mean performance accuracy threshold of 75% for the analysis of the results. We reasoned that this threshold represented good acquisition into memory of the auditory and visual stimuli and their pairing which was required for any influence of voice priming on reaction times to be detectable
Summary
There have been significant advances made in our understanding of how both familiar and unfamiliar faces are recognized, and the cognitive and neural mechanisms supporting face perception (see Calder, Rhodes, Johnson, & Haxby, 2011), it is unclear how other sources of cross-modal information contribute to person perception. These areas are considered unimodal and predominantly visual (Casey & Newell, 2007; Kilgour & Lederman, 2002) Such a core system incorporates a more anterior region of the brain, the superior temporal sulcus (e.g., Perrett et al, 1985), which represents the more changeable aspects of faces (e.g., lip movements in speech, facial expressions, eye gaze, etc.) for social cognition. This area is considered a multisensory, audio-visual region (e.g., Calder & Young, 2005) which facilitates inter-personal communication and recognition (Campanella & Belin, 2007). Other studies showing greater than chance performance in matching unfamiliar voices to unfamiliar faces (e.g., Kamachi, Hill, Lander, & Vatikiotis-bateson; Mavica & Barenholtz, 2012; Smith, Dunn, Baguley, & Stacey, 2016a, 2016b) suggests that redundant, multisensory information cues can enhance person perception in the absence of semantic knowledge
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