Verbal Overshadowing

Verbal overshadowing is the finding that putting a visual or other sensory experience into words can impair a person's later memory of that experience. Jonathan Schooler and Tonya Engstler-Schooler first documented the effect in 1990: participants who watched a video of a simulated robbery and were then asked to verbally describe the perpetrator's face performed worse at picking the correct face out of a lineup than participants who were not asked to describe it. The impairment grew stronger when the verbal description was given after a delay rather than immediately, and was greatest when it occurred shortly before the identification test. A 2001 meta-analysis by Meissner and Brigham confirmed the effect as reliable, though modest in size, and related earlier work by Carmichael and colleagues in 1932 had already shown that attaching a verbal label to an ambiguous visual figure at the time it was seen could bias how the figure was later remembered and drawn. The effect is understood to occur because verbal description relies on a different kind of memory representation than the original non-verbal, perceptual one, and putting the experience into words can distort or displace the original visual memory.