Psychology Commons^™

The Effects Of Verbal Overshadowing And Social Anxiety On Facial Recognition: A Replication And Extension, Arielle Rancourt

Honors College

There have been 314 post-conviction DNA exonerations, and about 70% of these wrongful convictions were due to witness misidentification. Many factors affect the accuracy of a witness’s testimony, including the concept of “verbal overshadowing,” in which the verbal reporting of a visual memory interferes with the subsequent recognition of the visual stimuli. The present study seeks to replicate Jonathan Schooler’s original findings with regard to this phenomenon (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990). The first experiment is focused on verbalizing a visual memory that is particularly hard to put into words: the memory of a face. The hypothesis for both the original …