The Cognitive Mechanism Of The Verbal Overshadowing Effect Of Face Recognition

In the present judicial practice,before a witness can identify a criminal,they usually need to describe the face of the criminal.But the verbal overshadowing effect shows,if the witness described the criminal in detail,it affected the subsequent identification of the criminal.The present study starts with the theoretical explanation of the verbal overshadowing effect,applied two experiments to discuss and analyze the cognitive mecanism of the verbal overshadowing effect and the influence of verbal information on face recognition.In experiment 1,the learning conditions are divided into description group and control group.There are three conditions for recognition:immediate recognition,30 minutes for recognition,1 day for recognition.TO explore the verbal overshadowing effect and release from verbal overshadowing,our research recode the number of hits and the number of false reports when the taregt face in the lineup and the target face not in the lineup.The results show that:(1)The verbal overshadowing effect exists,and as time goes on,the verbal overshadowing effect doesn't disappear,in other words,the release from verbal overshadowing doesn't appear.(2)After verbal description,the reason for the decline in the accuracy of the witnesses is that they are more conservative and choose to be more cautious.In experiment 2,by controlling the type of face information(featural information;configural information)and the quality of verbal description(forced recall condition;standard recall condition;warning recall condition),at the same time,the control group was set up to compare,recode the number of hits and the number of false reports when the taregt face in the lineup and the target face not in the lineup,to research the effect of verbal information on face recognition.The results show that:(1)The type of face information and the quality of the verbal description,are affect the recognition of face.too detailed description of facial featural information can lead to the worest recognition.(2)As the quality of verbal description isimproved,the ability to distinguish the target face will be improved,and the response bias will be more conservative.In this study,we support the idea of release from verbal overshadowing in the retrieval-based interference.In addition,the author further discusses and studies the parts of the verbal description in the two theories,namely,the transfer-inappropriate processing shift and the retrieval-based interference,we proved that the types of face infoemation and the quality of verbal description play key roles in face recognition.Furthermore,this study ulteriorly supports the idea of criterion shifts,that is,verbal descriptions can change the response bias of witnesses when they are identified.