The facilitating effect of verbalization on the recognition memory of incidentally learned faces

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that requiring people to verbally describe a target face from memory facilitates their subsequent recognition when their memory for the target is poor and interferes with recognition when such memory is strong. In Experiment 1, a target face was presented to participants for 30 s or 100 s under a nominal task instruction, and they incidentally familiarized themselves with it. Verbalization increased the rate of correct recognition only when the target was presented for 30 s and the performance of control participants was poor. In Experiment 2, participants observed a target without instruction for intentional learning or other nominal instruction, in a more ecologically valid context. Recognition performance was poor for control participants and verbalization increased the rate of correct recognition. These results appear to support the hypothesis. The implications for the identification of persons by eyewitnesses are discussed.The description and identification of people by eyewitnesses play an important role in police investigations and judicial hearings. Typically, before eyewitnesses are asked to identify a person from photographs or live alternatives (e.g. a lineup), they are required to report verbally the details of the target's appearance. This procedure is used because it is believed to provide information confirming that the witness was present at a critical event and/or to indicate the reliability of a witness's memory for a target person. However, if verbalization degrades recognition performance, this procedure can lead to errors in subsequent identification.Schooler and Engstler-Schooler (1990) showed that describing a target face from memory impairs subsequent recognition performance-the verbal overshadowing effect. Since that time, many studies have reported that verbalization interferes with face recognition (e.g.

See What I’m Saying? Expertise and Verbalisation in Perception and Imagery of Complex Scenes

“…This is in contrast to previous studies that have found a negative effect of verbalisation on recognition memory (verbal overshadowing). Itoh [47] found that verbalisation interferes with subsequent face recognition when memory for the target person is good, whereas verbalisation enhances recognition when memory is poor. So, the findings of the current experiment could be due to poor recognition memory for the stimuli at encoding, which can be seen in the low accuracy scores for pictures that were imagined only.…”

“…This second representation then leads to recoding interference or source confusion, thereby decreasing recognition accuracy. However, if the initial representation of the visual stimulus is itself coarse and lacking in detail [47] or if the verbal description is itself sufficient in discriminating between target and distracter items [40,45], the verbal overshadowing effect disappears or even reverses, and improved recognition is observed under conditions of verbalisation [48].…”

“…On the other hand, when a long delay elapses between verbalisation and the recognition test, then a facilitating effect of verbalisation is observed [46]. Verbalisation has also been found to enhance recognition memory if visual memory of the target is poor [47].…”

Verbalizing information salient to face identification does not cause verbal overshadowing1

“…This allowed manipulation of whether the verbally described features were distinguishing (modifi ed) features between target and distractors. A single target face was used because most verbal overshadowing studies use one test set ( Finger & Pezdek, 1999 ;Finger, 2002 ;Kitagami, et al ., 2002 ;Itoh, 2005 ). All stimuli were presented in gray scale.…”

“…In the present study, although participants' attention may have been directed to featural information, describing salient features may have reduced the detrimental eff ect of this processing shift on recognition performance by directing participants' attention to the salient features. Verbal enhancement eff ects on face recognition have been reported ( Winograd, 1981 ;Brown & Lloyd-Jones, 2005 ;Jones, et al ., 2013 ); however, participants in those studies verbalized information about targets in an encoding phase or immediately after target presentation (but see Itoh, 2005 ). The eff ect of verbalization may diff er depending on the timing.…”