Whom do words hurt? Individual differences in susceptibility to verbal overshadowing

Abstract

The phenomenon of verbal overshadowing, in which describing memory for nonverbal stimuli (e.g. faces, tastes, or music) interferes with subsequent recognition performance, has previously been associated with situations in which participants' perceptual expertise exceeded their verbal expertise (e.g. Melcher and Schooler, 1996). Such findings suggest that individual differences in perceptual and verbal ability should predict who will be vulnerable to verbalization. In this study participants performed six trials of a standard verbal overshadowing procedure (viewing a face, verbally recalling it or engaging in an unrelated activity, followed by taking a forced choice recognition test). Perceptual ability was assessed using both a domain specific measure (face recognition ability) and non‐specific measures (e.g. embedded figures). General verbal ability was determined on the basis of high school or college GPA. As predicted, verbal overshadowing (i.e. lower performance for verbalization relative to control participants) was greatest among participants with high perceptual expertise and low verbal expertise. This relationship was observed with both the domain‐specific and domain‐general measures of perceptual expertise. These findings suggest that individuals may be especially vulnerable to verbal overshadowing when their general perceptual abilities exceed their verbal abilities. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Persistence of the verbal overshadowing and weapon-focus effects on lineup identification performance.

“…The third finding involves face recognition ability and the verbal overshadowing effect. Contrary to Ryan and Schooler (1998), we did not observe a larger verbal overshadowing effect in stronger than weaker face recognizers. In fact, we observed the opposite effect with our signal-detection analyses: Stronger face recognizers were more resistant to the verbal overshadowing effect than were weaker face recognizers.…”

“…Are stronger face recognizers more resistant than weaker face recognizers to the verbal overshadowing effect? Counterintuitively, Ryan and Schooler (1998) observed a larger verbal overshadowing effect among stronger than weaker face recognizers. However, they showed participants target-present lineups only, and so they were unable to make any conclusions about differences in discriminability and response bias with respect to face recognition ability and the verbal overshadowing effect.…”

Verbalizing Facial Memory: Criterion Effects in Verbal Overshadowing.

“…First, the criterion explanation insists that verbal overshadowing should not occur with forced-choice lineups. Although this expectation was confirmed in our Experiments 2 and 3, other researchers have obtained a VOE with forced-choice lineups (e.g., Fallshore & Schooler, 1995; Ryan & Schooler, 1998). At first glance, these reports seem to present a major challenge to the criterion view.…”

Let's talk about faces: Identifying faces from verbal descriptions

“…Although it is possible that this is simply task fatigue, the reduction may suggest that verbalization of face information leads to an impairment in subsequent simultaneous discrimination of faces. Of note, some studies of eyewitness memory have found that describing faces from memory leads to subsequent poorer recognition of those same faces, and this effect is larger for individuals who have higher perceptual expertise for faces (‘verbal overshadowing effect’; Ryan & Schooler, 1998 ). The question of whether the task of describing faces causes an impairment in subsequent simultaneous discrimination of different faces, and whether this is related to an individual's perceptual expertise for faces, requires further investigation.…”