Verbal overshadowing

This was first reported by Schooler and Engstler-Schooler (1990) where it was shown that the effects can be observed across multiple domains of cognition which are known to rely on non-verbal knowledge and perceptual expertise.

[1] In their study, participants watched a video of a simulated robbery and were instructed to either verbally describe the robber or engage in a control task.

A larger effect was detected when the verbal description was provided 20, rather than 5, minutes after the video, and immediately before the test lineup.

[3] The effects of verbal overshadowing have been generalized across multiple domains of cognition that are known to rely on non-verbal knowledge and perceptual expertise, such as memory.

[clarification needed][2] The verbal overshadowing effect can be found for facial recognition because faces are predominately processed in a holistic or configurable manner.

Wickham and Swift (2006) suggested that the verbal overshadowing effect is not seen in describing all faces, and one aspect that determines this is distinctiveness.

[9] In studies of eyewitness reports, variation in response criteria given by participants influenced the quality of the descriptions generated and accuracy on identification task, known as the retrieval-based effect.

This meets Schooler et al.'s (1997) modality mismatch criterion, meaning that describing the speakers age, gender, or accent is difficult, making voice recognition susceptible to the verbal overshadowing phenomenon.

It was found that the method of memory encoding had no impact on performance, and that hearing a telephone voice reduced confidence but did not affect accuracy.

[13] The data showed an effect of verbal overshadowing in voice recognition and provided yet another disassociation between confidence and performance.

(P.979)[13] Perfect, Hunt, and Harris (2002) did a small-scale study that showed a reliable verbal overshadowing effect on voice identification, thus confirming previous research that showed verbally describing a to-be-recognized (non-verbal) stimulus leads to decrease in recognition accuracy without reducing confidence.

This disassociation between performance and confidence offers scope to test theoretical accounts of the verbal overshadowing phenomena, and it is an issue that has been neglected so far.

[13] A more recent study by Wilson, Seale-Carlisle, and Mickes (2017) found that confidence is predictive of accuracy in verbal overshadowing.

Other results from their study concluded that police should encourage reporting crimes immediately and take down descriptions of perpetrators as soon as possible in order to reduce the effects of verbal overshadowing.

One explanation for the effect is based on a shift in a person's recognition criteria, or increased hesitancy in choosing someone from a lineup.

The criterion effect is persistent and known to play a large part in recognition paradigms that allow voluntary responses, moreso when there is a tradeoff between quantity and accuracy.

[14] The verbal overshadowing effect is caused by strict recognition criteria that only affect identification rates when a "not present" response is possible.

Finger and Pezdek (1999) took this as a retroactive interference effect on memory, caused by higher verbalization when participants completed a complicated rather than an easy task.

Hatano et al. (2015) stated: Our hypothesis is that this is due to (a) the use of single-trial testing methods, (b) individual differences, and (c) relatively uncontrolled extraneous variables (e.g., how many distinctive facial features the target and distractors share).

That is, given that the attractor states in the hidden layer captured the visual similarity of inputs, the resultant internal representation by verbalization was dissimilar from that required for recognition of the target face.

[6] This was the reason why target-description accuracy in isolation does not necessarily predict the effect of verbal overshadowing in a linear fashion.

[6] Brandimonte and Collina (2008) conducted three experiments that support a retrieval based, recording-interference explanation of verbal overshadowing.

[14] The TIR hypothesis assumes the original memory trace of the target remains and becomes temporarily inaccessible, rather than being permanently changed by verbalization.

Verbalization leads cognitive processing to an inappropriate style, which stops retrieval of the non-verbal information needed for facial recognition.

(p. 91)[10]According to this hypothesis, participants in the proximal imagining condition were more impaired because they encoded the target face at first using a holistic, non-verbal, and non-analytic process.

[10] This suggested that prevention of verbal overshadowing in real life situations can be effected with a manipulation, such as encouraging global thinking.

[10] Consistent with TIR, a study by Dehon, Vanootighem, and Bredart (2013) showed the absence of correlation between descriptor accuracy, vocabulary performance, and correct identification.

[17] Neither quality nor quantity of descriptors affected identification accuracy, which was only impacted by the act of verbally describing a face.

[20] In a study similar to Schooler et al. (1990), Kinlen, Adams-Price, and Henley (2007) showed the following: The results indicated that the older adults were better at recognizing the criminal when a recognition measure taking confidence into account was employed.