Interaction between vision and audition in face recognition

Face studies have shown that distinctive faces are more easily recognized than typical faces in memory tasks. We investigated whether a cross-modal interaction between auditory and visual stimuli exists for face distinctiveness. During training, participants were presented with faces from two sets. In one set all faces were accompanied by characteristic auditory stimuli (d-faces). In the other set, all faces were accompanied by typical auditory stimuli (s-faces). Face stimuli were counterbalanced across auditory conditions. We measured recognition performance in an old/new recognition task. Face recognition alone was tested. Our results show that participants were significantly better (t(12) = 3.89, p< 0.005) at recognizing d-faces than s-faces in the test session. These results show that there is an interaction between different sensory inputs and that typicality of stimuli in one modality can be modified by concomitantly presented stimuli in other sensory modalities