An examination of the cognitive processes underlying the verbal overshadowing effect

Verbal overshadowing occurs when participants describe a previously viewed nonverbal stimulus such as a face prior to a recognition memory test in which they choose the target stimulus from several verbally similar distractors. The results of numerous studies indicate that recognition accuracy is lower when participants describe the face or other nonverbal stimulus as compared to a no description control condition. Although it is clear that describing the face negatively affects one's ability to access the original memory representation at the time of the recognition test, the specific cognitive mechanisms underlying the phenomenon have not been determined. The results of the two-experiment study presented here suggest that transfer appropriate processing is the mechanism responsible for verbal overshadowing. According to transfer appropriate processing, memory performance is dependent on the degree to which the processing operations utilized at the time of encoding match those relied upon during retrieval. In the verbal overshadowing paradigm, participants initially view a nonverbal stimulus—a perceptual processing task. Subsequently, participants describe the stimulus—a verbal processing task. It is hypothesized that the mismatch in processing operations between encoding and describing the stimulus results in lower recognition accuracy and thus verbal overshadowing. In Experiment 1, participants viewed a face. Subsequently, half described the face; the other half completed a distractor task. Next, participants engaged in a perceptual processing task in the form of a series of mazes or a verbal processing task. Participants who described the face and completed the mazes experienced a release from verbal overshadowing indicated by higher face recognition memory as compared to participants who described the face and completed the verbal processing task. Experiment 2 provided an additional test of the extent to which verbal overshadowing can be released when participants engage in an unrelated perceptual processing task subsequent to describing the face. In Experiment 2, verbal overshadowing was alleviated when participants listened to instrumental music after describing the face thus demonstrating that an auditory perceptual task can also release verbal overshadowing. The results of these two experiments suggest that transfer appropriate processing is the cognitive mechanism underlying the verbal overshadowing phenomenon.