Can voice cues facilitate newborns' recognition of faces shown in different poses?

The question whether the mother's voice would facilitate recognition of her face presented in different orientations was investigated using a spontaneous visual procedure. Each infant was presented with two alternating voices. These were the recorded voices of the mother and that of a female stranger. The faces were silent, and each was accompanied by mouth movements. The pairings of the mother's voice with the 22° pose of her face and the voice with the full face pose resulted in significant preferences while the combination of the voice-3/4 profile pose did not. However, the mother's voice alone elicited more head turns. Not only did the newborns prefer their mother's voice over a novel one, but they could make finer discriminations between the mother's voice and that of a female relative (to whom they were occasionally exposed to from birth). These findings are a clear evidence that neonates are capable of learning the arbitrary voice-face associations within the full face and 22 orientations, and that face orientation disturbs the perception of amodal relations, a crucial information for the detection of the arbitrary voice-face relations.