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Abstract

We can recognise distinctive faces more easily than typical ones. We investigated whether this distinctiveness effect appears for visually typical faces when these faces have been associated with features that are distinctive in another sensory modality. Participants first learned a set of unfamiliar faces. During learning, half of these faces were paired with distinctive auditory stimuli and half with typical stimuli. In experiment 1, the auditory stimuli were voices. We found that recognition performance in a visual recognition test was significantly (p < 0.005) better for faces that had been paired with distinctive voices. In experiment 2, we tested whether voice information improved face recognition directly by association or whether distinctiveness effects were due to enhanced attention during learning. In a priming experiment, participants recognised a face significantly faster (p <0.05) when this face was preceded by its congruent voice. Thus the quality of auditory information can affect recognition in another modality like vision. In experiment 3, the stimuli consisted of non-speech sounds. In this experiment, we tested whether voices and faces represent a special case of cross-modal memory enhancement or whether this distinctiveness effect occurs also with more arbitrary associations. Recognition performance in a visual recognition test suggests that a similar effect is present.