Verbal overshadowing refers to describing a nonverbal experience, which might impair
subsequent recognition. One study found that verbalizing a visual memory may produce a verbally biased memory representation that can interfere with the application of the original visual memory. This effect has real-life consequences, putting innocent people behind bars. One witness might describe the details of an incident one way and another witness another way. Elizabeth Loftus discovered this effect and the malleability of human memory.
This effect also occurs in tastes and smells, but does not seem to have an impact on sommeliers. They are able to identify a wine they just tasted and when asked to provide a verbal description of the wine after tasting it, their recognition skills are not impaired. This could be attributed to the years of training and use of conceptual knowledge.
Hi Diana,
ReplyDeleteInteresting post! I liked that you were able to relate overshadowing to witnesses wrongfully accounting incidents which happens so often