I RECOGNIZE YOU BUT I CANT PLACE YOU - AN INVESTIGATION OF FAMILIAR-ONLY EXPERIENCES DURING TESTS OF VOICE AND FACE RECOGNITION

In this paper, we examine in detail the situation in which a subject f inds that a face or voice is familiar but is unable to retrieve any bi ographical information about the person concerned. In two experiments, subjects were asked to identify a set of 40 celebrities either from h earing their voice or from seeing their face. Although many more celeb rities were identified and named in response to their face than their voice, the results showed that there was a very large number of occasi ons when a celebrity's voice was felt to be familiar but the subject w as unable to retrieve any biographical information about the person. T his situation occurred less frequently in response to seeing a celebri ty's face; when a face was found familiar, the subject was much more l ikely to be able to recall the celebrity's occupation. The possibility that these results might have come about because subjects were using different criteria to determine familiarity in the face and voice cond itions was investigated and discounted. An additional finding was that when subjects found a face to be familiar-only, they were able to rec all significantly more additional information about the person when th ey were cued by the person's voice than when they simply saw the face again. These results are discussed in relation to the models of person recognition put forward by Bruce and Young (1986) and Burton, Bruce, and Johnston (1990).