Recalling episodic information about personally known faces and voices

This study was aimed at investigating whether the retrieval of episodic information is more likely to be associated with the recognition of personally familiar faces than voices. Hence, the proportions of episodic memories recalled following the recognition of personally known faces and voices was assessed, using a modified version of the Remember/Know paradigm. Present findings showed that episodic information was more often retrieved from familiar faces than from familiar voices. Furthermore, this advantage of faces over voices was significant even when face recognition was rendered similar as that for voices by blurring the faces. The same pattern of results was observed regarding semantic information retrieval (i.e. the target person's occupation). 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. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.