Distinctive auditory information improves visual face recognition

Face recognition studies have shown that distinctiveness can improve recognition. Distinctiveness effects have also been found in stimuli other than faces suggesting that it is a general mechanism. Here we tested cross-modal effects of distinctiveness and asked whether distinctive voices can improve memory for otherwise typical faces. In all experiments participants first learned a set of static, unfamiliar faces. During learning, half of these faces were paired with distinctive voices and half were paired with typical voices. Face stimuli were counterbalanced across these voice conditions. In Experiment 1 we found that recognition performance in a visual recognition test was significantly (