Stevenage, S.
School of Psychology, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
A traditional priming paradigm was used to explore the implications of a theoretical framework in which face processing and voice processing represent two parallel pathways in a single multi-modality person-recognition system. Participants were presented with either the face or the voice of one celebrity, followed by the face of another celebrity, and the two celebrities were either semantically associated or were unrelated. The participants’ task was to give a speeded familiarity judgement to the second face. The results revealed the anticipated within-modality associative priming effect in which the face of one celebrity facilitated the familiarity judgement to the face of an associate. Importantly, the results also revealed cross-modality associative priming such that the voice of one celebrity successfully facilitated the familiarity judgement to the face of an associate. These data provide a clear demonstration of the capacity for one modality to influence the other. As such, they provide support for the existence of a framework in which the processing within different modalities sits in parallel within a single multi-modal system.