Abstract
Visual memory can be changed unlike photographs. One example of this imperfect nature of visual memory is verbal overshadowing effect; describing remembered faces impairs the recognition of the described faces (Meissner & Memon, 2002; Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990). Unlike the results using a recognition task, Lloyd-Jones et al. (2006) found that verbalization did not impair visual memory when a priming task was used. However, verbalization might modulate the amount of priming if the processing mode of a priming task is not matched to the one in verbalization, because inappropriate mode is one of the major reasons for verbal overshadowing (Macrae & Lewis, 2002; Schooler, 2002). We tested this hypothesis using a full factorial design. Specifically, we varied the types of verbalization - either feature-focused or global descriptions. We also modulated the types of stimuli in the priming task – either upright or inverted faces. Participants first studied 24 faces for 5 seconds each. Depending on each participant’s assignment to the types of verbalization, they performed a different verbalization task for 5 minutes. After this procedure, all of them performed a gender discrimination task on the studied and new faces presented either upright or inverted. We calculated the effect of priming by subtracting reaction times to the studied faces from those to new faces. We found feature-focused description removed the effect of priming for upright faces, but not for inverted faces. On the contrary, global description removed the effect of priming for inverted faces, but not for upright faces. The results suggest that verbalization changes the amount of priming if the processing mode is not matched to the one needed to perform a task. In addition, visual representation is influenced by verbalization because the effect of priming depended on the types of verbalization.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2012