The long term objective of this research program is to determine how, why, and when verbal recall of a perceptual experience can impair memory. The proposed research will explore the hypothesis that this type of interference, termed verbal overshadowing, results from interference between two global memory components: a verbal, featural, conceptual, component and a perceptual, holistic, familiarity component. The basic approach for testing this hypothesis will be to explore whether verbalization of perceptual memories causes the recognition mechanism to shift its emphasis from the information and processes hypothesized to be associated with the perceptual component to those of the verbal component. The first set of experiments will use communication accuracy measures and visual and verbal concurrent interference tasks to explore the hypothesis that verbalizing a previously encountered face or color causes the recognition process to emphasize the verbal component at the expense of the perceptual component. The second set of experiments will test the hypothesis that reliance on the hypothesized verbal component results in a deemphasis on configural information and holistic processing. This hypothesis predicts that when configural information is very important for example when a face changes in orientation between encoding and test, that verbalization may be quite disruptive. However, when configural information is not involved in recognition, as is the case for inverted faces, then verbalization should be benign and possibly beneficial. The third set of experiments will explore the differential time course of the two memory components suggested by the fact that verbal overshadowing is alleviated when subjects are forced to make quick recognition decisions. The fourth set of experiments will explore the generality of verbal overshadowing to: odor, music, abstract shapes, and affective decisions. In later years, additional research will further flesh out the verbal overshadowing mechanisms by: 1) examining its correspondence to laterality differences, 2) exploring whether the counter-phenomena of """"""""visual overshadowing"""""""" occurs, and 3) determining the relationship between verbal overshadowing and the development of verbal and non-verbal expertise. This research is directly relevant to literatures on dual codes, two stage recognition theories, holistic/analytic processing distinctions, laterality differences, and research investigating the verbal mediation of memory. It also has implied implications to the areas of eyewitness testimony, instructional development, and to mental health settings in which patients may be either instructed or abnormally inclined to verbalize their experiences.
| Fallshore, M; Schooler, J W (1995) Verbal vulnerability of perceptual expertise. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 21:1608-23 |
