The face advantage in recalling episodic information: Implications for modeling human memory

Recent evidence comparing recognition memory for famous faces and famous voices reveals an advantage for faces to elicit greater levels of episodic and semantic information than voices, even when overall levels of difficulty are matched between the two modalities. The paper by Barsics and Brédart makes a significant advance to this literature by demonstrating that even when encoding strategies are maximized to favor voice over face encoding by using personally familiar stimuli, facial cues continue to provide a more successful means for associating episodic and semantic memories than voices. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the role of familiarity and its associated links to semantic memory as captured by person recognition memory models.