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.

Unfamiliar faces are not faces: Evidence from a matching task

“…Using face memory tests, this task has sometimes predicted performance and has sometimes not (Courtois & Mueller, 1981;Lavrakas et al, 1976;Ryan & Schooler, 1998). Using face matching, there is no suggestion of an effect.…”

“…Witkin, Dyk, Faterson, Goodenough, and Karp (1974) predicted that field dependents would be more accurate in face recognition than would field independents, since they are giving more attention to the social content of their surroundings. Some studies have supported this prediction (Messick & Damarin, 1964), others have shown the precise converse pattern (Lavrakas, Buri, & Mayzner, 1976), and others have found no relationship between field dependence and face recognition performance (Courtois & Mueller, 1982;Ryan & Schooler, 1998).…”

Following the Wrong Footsteps: Fixation Effects of Pictorial Examples in a Design Problem-Solving Task.

“…In response to the results obtained in Experiment 1, however, it could be argued that the concurrent verbalization procedure might have interfered with the problem-solving process, particularly for the defixation condition, thus making participants more aware of the problematic elements of the example designs and of the restrictions to avoid reproducing them. Recent findings by Hamel and Elshout (2000; see also Ryan & Schooler, 1998;Schooler & Melcher, 1995), for example, suggest that concurrent verbalization may assist participants in avoiding making mistakes in problem solving. Furthermore, as supported by the qualitative analysis, a significant proportion of participants in Experiment 1 engaged in interaction with the experimenter, mostly in the defixation condition.…”

Effects of processing bias on the recognition of composite face halves

“…The standard effect is that verbal description causes an impairment in subsequent lineup identification (e.g., Dodson, Johnson, & Schooler, 1997;Fallshore & Schooler, 1995;Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990;Westerman & Larsen, 1997), which has been attributed to a processing bias that transfers from the description to the identification test (e.g., Dodson et al, 1997;Schooler, 2002). This effect has been tested using multiple trials, with mixed results (e.g., Brown & Lloyd-Jones, 2002;Fallshore & Schooler, 1995;Melcher & Schooler, 1996;Ryan & Schooler, 1998). Interestingly, only one of these studies has demonstrated a detrimental effect of verbal description over a series of trials (Brown & Lloyd-Jones, 2002), with the remainder showing a verbal overshadowing effect only for the first trial following a verbal description.…”