Whom do words hurt? Individual differences in susceptibility to verbal overshadowing
✍ Scribed by Robert S. Ryan; Jonathan W. Schooler
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 214 KB
- Volume
- 12
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0888-4080
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
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 ®ndings suggest that individual dierences 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 speci®c measure ( face recognition ability) and non-speci®c measures (e.g. embedded ®gures). 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-speci®c and domain-general measures of perceptual expertise. These ®ndings suggest that individuals may be especially vulnerable to verbal overshadowing when their general perceptual abilities exceed their verbal abilities.