Person Recognition Is Easier from Faces than from Voices

This article reviews a number of recent studies that systematically compared the access to semantic and episodic information from faces and voices. Results have showed that semantic and episodic information is easier to retrieve from faces than from voices. This advantage of faces over voices is a robust phenomenon, which emerges whatever the kind of target persons, might they be famous, personally familiar to the participants, or newly learned. Theoretical accounts of this face advantage over voice are finally discussed.