Recalling episodic and semantic information about famous faces and voices

Abstract

In this study, we used the distinction between remember and know (R/K) recognition responses to investigate the retrieval of episodic information during familiar face and voice recognition. The results showed that familiar faces presented in standard format were recognized with R responses on approximately 50% of the trials. The corresponding figure for voices was less than 20%. Even when overall levels of recognition were matched between faces and voices by blurring the faces, significantly more R responses were observed for faces than for voices. Voices were significantly more likely to be recognized with K responses than were blurred faces. These findings indicate that episodic information was recalled more often from familiar faces than from familiar voices. The results also showed that episodic information about a familiar person was never recalled unless some semantic information, such as the person's occupation, was also retrieved.

Recalling semantic information about personally known faces and voices

“…As mentioned earlier, previous research that investigated this question provided contrasting results. In the Damjanovic and Hanley (2007) study, semantic information was more frequently reported from standard than from blurred faces and, from blurred faces than from voices whereas, in the Hanley and Turner (2000) study, semantic information was recalled more often from standard than from blurred faces, but blurred faces and voices produced similar rates of semantic information retrieval. For this reason, we decided to examine this question further by using faces and voices of personally familiar persons as stimuli rather than those of famous people.…”

“…When these problems were avoided by employing the Schweinberger, Herholz, and Steif (1997) procedure designed to limit the extent to which the speech content of the extracts could give clues to a speaker's identity, the results unambiguously indicated that more semantic details could be recalled from blurred faces than from voices even though overall recognition performance was similar for both types of stimuli. Although, these two studies (Damjanovic & Hanley, 2007;Hanley & Damjanovic, 2008) confirm the view that access to semantic information is easier from faces, even blurred, than voices, further studies are needed.…”

“…Such results did not support the view that it is more difficult to associate semantic information with people's voice than with people's face. Nevertheless, more recent studies (Damjanovic & Hanley, 2007;Hanley & Damjanovic, 2008) suggested that the latter results were due to methodological problems. The spoken extracts used in the voice condition of the Hanley and Turner study were likely to provide cues as to the occupation of some of the target celebrities.…”

“…As in the Damjanovic and Hanley (2007) study, to ensure that overall familiarity was similar in the voice and the blurred face conditions, 32 other participants drawn from the same population as those described in the Participants section were asked to rate the familiarity of the targets on a scale of 00''unfamiliar'' to 30''very familiar''. Sixteen participants rated the blurred faces and gave them a mean familiarity of 1.63 (SD00.57).…”

“…voices (e.g., Damjanovic & Hanley, 2007;Hanley, Smith, & Hadfield, 1998;Hanley & Turner, 2000). The present study was aimed at examining further the retrieval of semantic information associated with the recognition of familiar individuals from faces and voices by using personally familiar individuals rather than celebrities as target people.…”