Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When subjects generate a detailed, memory-based description of complex visual stimuli such as faces, their recognition performance can be worse than nondescribing controls. This effect, termed verbal overshadowing. typically occurs when the stimulus is difficult to describe, not normally verbalized in detail, and when subjects are naive about the task demands. Verbal overshadowing has previously been shown to effect visually based memory (for faces and colors). This experiment was designed to: 1) detect verbal overshadowing in another sense modality, taste, and 2) to determine if domain-related expertise modulates susceptibility to verbal overshadowing. Wine tasting was chosen as a domain in which to attempt to control subjects' relative levels of verbal and perceptual expertise. Based on suggestive data from previous face recognition studies, it was hypothesized that subjects whose perceptual expertise was greater than their domain-related verbal expertise (termed Intermediates) would show verbal overshadowing. On the other hand, subjects with relatively equal perceptual and verbal expertise, either low/low (Novices) or high/high (Experts) would not show verbalization effects. After tasting a target red wine Verbalization subjects wrote detailed taste descriptions from memory while controls participated in an unrelated verbal task. All subjects then attempted to identify the target wine from among three foils. As predicted, the verbalizing Intermediates performed significantly worse than the nonverbalizing controls on Trial 1. No-effect of verbalization was observed for either the novices or experts. The results are explained in terms of the differential development of perceptual and verbal skills in the course of becoming an expert.