Meissner C A, Brigham J C, Kelley C M
Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee 32306-1270, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2001 Jan;29(1):176-86. doi: 10.3758/bf03195751.
Recent studies of eyewitness memory have observed deleterious effects of producing a verbal description on later identification accuracy of a previously viewed face, an effect termed verbal overshadowing (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990). The present research investigated whether the phenomenon of verbal overshadowing may be constrained by variation in participants' initial retrieval processes, such that verbalization of a previously viewed stimulus could produce either positive or negative influences on subsequent attempts at recollection. To assess the validity of this hypothesis, we manipulated participants' response criterion during the verbal description task. As predicted, variation in response criterion significantly influenced not only the quality of the description generated but also accuracy on a subsequent identification task. This retrieval-based effect was found to persist despite either a postdescription delay (Experiment 1) or source-monitoring instructions at the time of the identification task (Experiment 2). We conclude that retrieval-based processes exert a powerful influence over the accuracy of verbalization and subsequent identification of a target face.
近期关于目击者记忆的研究发现，对先前看到的面孔进行语言描述会对之后的识别准确性产生有害影响，这种效应被称为语言遮蔽效应（Schooler和Engstler-Schooler，1990）。本研究调查了语言遮蔽现象是否会受到参与者初始检索过程变化的限制，即对先前看到的刺激进行语言表达可能会对后续的回忆尝试产生积极或消极影响。为了评估这一假设的有效性，我们在语言描述任务中操纵了参与者的反应标准。正如预期的那样，反应标准的变化不仅显著影响了所生成描述的质量，还影响了后续识别任务的准确性。尽管在描述后有延迟（实验1）或在识别任务时给出了来源监控指示（实验2），基于检索的效应仍然存在。我们得出结论，基于检索的过程对目标面孔的语言表达准确性和后续识别有着强大的影响。
