Cross-modal interactions of faces, voices and names in person familiarity

ABSTRACT

Person recognition often involves integration of several cues. We asked if familiarity judgments for one cue were influenced by the congruency of pairings with other cues. In a learning phase, subjects studied audiovisual clips of faces, voices and names. A test phase presented uni-modal and bi-modal stimuli. For 10 subjects the bi-modal test stimuli were faces and voices, for 10 faces and names, and for 10 voices and names. In one set of blocks the target was the first modality, and in the other set it was the second. Targets in bi-modal stimuli were paired with either the same or a different identity in the second modality. Face/voice combinations showed congruency effects in reaction time but face/name and voice/name combinations did not. There was no difference between faces modulating target voices and voices modulating target faces. This is consistent with interactions between sensory representations before amodal stages of person recognition.

KEYWORDS:

• Sensory integration
• bi-modal
• recognition
• sensory combination
• congruency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Sherryse L. Corrow http://orcid.org//0000-0001-7774-8453

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Discovery Grant RGPIN 319129 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. JB was supported by Canada Research Chair 950-228984 and the Marianne Koerner Chair in Brain Diseases. SC is supported by the National Eye Institute under award number F32 EY023479-02. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.