It has long been accepted that the key to improving your memory lies in ‘talking it out,’ verbalizing your experience and in doing so unlocking a stronger, more detailed recollection of the events that transpired, or the small details that you are attempting to remember. Experts are now pointing to a number of studies that conclude talking through your experiences might actually be hindering your memory!
The phenomenon is called Verbal Overshadowing. It was first coined following a series of 6 experiments conducted by Jonathan W. Schooler and Tonya Y. Engstler-Schooler in 1990. Throughout the experiments, they aimed to discover if verbalization had an impact on nonverbal cognition in the participants. They ultimately concluded that “…verbalizing the appearance of previously seen visual stimuli impaired subsequent recognition performance.”
What does this mean? Discussing that which you have seen can actually negatively impact your ability to remember it thereafter. For example, if you have witnessed a crime and the police are asking you to describe the crime scene and the perpetrator, they may actually be doing everyone a disservice! Sure, in that moment you are able to describe the details of this individual’s face in incredible detail, with it fresh on your mind. However, days later when you are brought in to view a photo array and asked to pick out the individual that you saw there at the time, you may no longer be able to recognize the face!
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Further studies, including a 1997 study titled ‘The verbal overshadowing effect: why descriptions impair face recognition,’ examined this phenomenon in much greater detail. Accepting that verbally describing the face can impact your memory, this study looked at 3 different situations, assessing whether they all had an impact on the non-verbal cognitive memory or not. This included generating a description of a previously seen face, instructing the test subjects to be aware of the potential of competing memories a well as the impact when describing an entirely different face prior to testing recognition.
The results raised an interesting question – are law enforcement officials helping their investigations by requesting this information early when the information is fresh on their minds, or are they ultimately hurting their case due to the longer-term effects of verbal overshadowing?
Good news: Experts at the University of California, Santa Barbara assure those interested that while verbal overshadowing may interfere with your memory, the effects don’t have to be permanent. In a summary regarding their work on this topic, they write: “we have now conducted several studies demonstrating that the effects of verbalization can be reversed by introducing retrieval conditions that engage access to the original perceptual memory. Thus, verbalization overshadows but does not eradicate the original memory.”
Johnathan Schooler and the University of California, Santa Barbara continue to investigate the effects of verbal overshadowing, the science behind the phenomenon and how it can be avoided and/or reversed.
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