Citation

Brown C, Lloyd-Jones TJ. Appl. Cogn. Psychol. 2003; 17(2): 183-201.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2003, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/acp.861

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

We present four experiments examining 'verbal overshadowing' (the phenomenon that verbally describing a stimulus can interfere with subsequent recognition of that stimulus) using a new multiple stimuli presentation paradigm. Participants are exposed to 12 to-be-remembered stimuli (faces or cars) and then describe (or not, in the control condition) a related stimulus (a 13th face or car). Subsequently, participants have to discriminate the original 12 stimuli from 12 distracters (in a 'yes/no' recognition decision). Verbal overshadowing occurs for both accuracy and response times for both face and car recognition, when participants have previously described a face. When participants describe a car prior to recognition, however, verbal overshadowing does not occur. We argue that (1) the paradigm provides a new tool for studying verbal overshadowing and (2) verbal overshadowing is not 'semantic category-bound' (i.e. limited to describing stimuli within the same semantic category). We interpret these findings within a 'transfer-inappropriate retrieval' framework (Schooler et al., 1997). Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Language: en