Earwitness testimony 2. Voices, faces and context

Hearing Faces and Seeing Voices: The Integration and Interaction of Face and Voice Processing

“…Perhaps the best known example of this is the Facial Overshadowing effect (Cook & Wilding, 1997). This describes the finding that, when participants attempt to recognise a once-heard voice, they perform better when that voice has been presented in isolation at study rather than when presented alongside its face (Cook & Wilding, 1997;McAllister, Dale, Bregman, McCabe & Cotton, 1993).…”

“…This describes the finding that, when participants attempt to recognise a once-heard voice, they perform better when that voice has been presented in isolation at study rather than when presented alongside its face (Cook & Wilding, 1997;McAllister, Dale, Bregman, McCabe & Cotton, 1993). Stevenage, Howland and Tippelt (2011) extended this design to show that this audiovisual impairment was only demonstrated during voice recognition; in comparison, face recognition remained strong and stable no matter whether participants studied an isolated face or an audiovisual combination.…”

Audiovisual speech facilitates voice learning

“…At issue here is not the relative memorability of faces and voices; the consensus is that faces are easier to learn and recall than voices (Cook & Wilding, 1997;Legge, Grosmann, & Pieper, 1984;Shepard, 1967;Woodhead, Baddeley, & Simmonds, 1979;Yarmey, 1986). What remains to be established is how voice information and visible speaker information interact during talker recognition and speech recognition.…”

“…Our results differ from other reports that have shown either negative effects or null effects of face information on voice encoding (Armstrong & McKelvie, 1996;Cook & Wilding, 1997, 2001Legge et al, 1984;Yarmey, 1993). Despite a number of procedural differences between the present study and previous studies that limit direct comparisons, including the materials and the training and testing tasks, we suspect that the amount of exposure to the talkers prior to the voice recognition test was the main reason for the discrepancy.…”

Cross-modal processing of voices and faces in developmental prosopagnosia and developmental phonagnosia

“…3. It has also been reported that voice recognition can be impaired, rather than improved, by the presence of a visual face during learning, an effect referred to as "face-overshadowing" (Cook & Wilding, 1997, Cook & Wilding, 2001. Within this context, the saliency of the face interferes with the ability to attend to the voice identity.…”