Articulatory suppression attenuates the verbal overshadowing effect: a role for verbal encoding in face identification

Abstract

Verbal overshadowing is the phenomenon that verbally describing a face between presentation and test can impair identification of the face (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990). This study examined the effects of articulatory suppression and distinctiveness upon the magnitude of the verbal overshadowing effect. Participants engaged in articulatory suppression or a control task whilst viewing a target face. They then either described the face or completed a distractor task before selecting the target face from a line-up. This was repeated for 12 trials. Articulatory suppression impaired identification performance overall, and reduced the negative effects of description to nonsignificance, whereas the control group demonstrated the standard verbal overshadowing effect. Typical faces showed verbal overshadowing, whereas distinctive faces did not. These results are consistent with the view that verbal overshadowing arises because the description of the target face creates a verbal code that interferes with a verbal code created spontaneously during encoding.

The role of verbal processing at different stages of recognition memory for faces

“…This is in agreement with the findings of Wickham and Swift (2006), and indicates that verbal representations of faces have important values in performing a face recognition task, whether it is sequential or simultaneous recognition. These results suggest that faces may be one class of stimuli that can be readily verbalised.…”

“…However, this does not necessarily eliminate the possibility of the involvement of verbal processing during encoding nor its contribution to subsequent memory performance. Indeed, consistent with an earlier study (Wickham & Swift, 2006), our results demonstrate that verbal processes are active during the encoding stage. Wickham and Swift suggest that verbal overshadowing of line-up identification in their study may have been due to interference between verbal representations formed during and after learning, rather than interference between the original visual representation and the subsequent verbal representation.…”

The impact of irrelevant auditory facial descriptions on memory for target faces: implications for eyewitness memory

“…The congruent speech could, therefore, interfere with the subjective descriptors that may be more useful for the construction of the less distinctive composite. This notion coheres rather nicely with the idea that verbalization impairs memory for typical rather than distinctive faces (Wickham & Swift, 2006). For example, in their study of verbal overshadowing, Wickham and Swift (2006) found that post-encoding descriptions of faces that were independently rated as typical, as compared to distinctive, interfered more with the spontaneous verbal code created during the face learning, thereby impairing recognition of the face from a lineup.…”

Why Verbalization of Non-Verbal Memory Reduces Recognition Accuracy: A Computational Approach to Verbal Overshadowing

“…Therefore, it would be constructive to clarify the reasons for the occasional replication failures. In addition to the target-distractor similarity factor (e.g., [ 6 , 7 ]) and the description accuracy [ 2 , 5 , 8 ], the present study also clarified the effect of other random factors. Thus, there were individual differences in subjects regarding how the familiarity distribution of old items and that of new items change by verbalization ( Fig 10 ).…”