Collaborative decision-making trains face and voice identity matching

Humans often struggle to accurately determine whether two different unfamiliar voice samples or face images belong to the same person. One method shown to boost face-matching performance is to have participants perform the task in pairs, which results in subsequent improvements for the poorer performers. This is a phenomenon known as ‘the pairs training effect’. Previous studies have explored the pairs training effect using simultaneous face matching tasks whereby the two face images are presented side by side at the same time. Here we tested the efficacy of the pairs paradigm in unfamiliar voice matching (Experiment 1) which requires sequential presentation of the voices. We also tested sequential face matching (Experiment 2) to align the face task with the temporal demands of the voice task. In both experiments, participants completed one third of trials individually, one third in a pair, and a final third individually again. Across both tasks, we found that participants who initially performed poorly in the first individual task improved when completing the task in a pair and, importantly, retained this improvement in the final individual phase. Our findings show that the pairs training effect extends to identity matching of unfamiliar voices and remains even when stimuli are presented sequentially.