In this study we aimed at verifying the influence of face-voice association in personal identity recognition without familiarity. By means of two experiments, we assessed the effect of task-irrelevant stimuli in unimodal recognition of faces and voices and the influence of speech motion.

In Experiment 1 participants memorized a list composed either of unimodal or bimodal items. During the presentation of a more extended test list, always unimodal (voices or faces, depending on the experimental group), they were asked to recall the items previously presented. Results indicate that voice recognition is negatively affected by bimodal encoding, while face recognition is not. When subjects are explicitly required to pay selective attention to a specific modality during the encoding phase, we found that also voice recognition is unaffected by bimodal encoding.

In Experiment 2 participants memorized a list of dynamic stimuli (talking faces). They were required to recognize stimuli in more extended sequences of items crossing unimodal/bimodal and dynamic/static conditions. In dynamic conditions (unimodally and bimodally) performances are always higher than in static ones.

Altogether, our results are consistent with a model of independent face and voice processing in person recognition without familiarity. Moreover, speech motion positively affects person recognition.