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Verbal Overshadowing

The verbal overshadowing is terminology most often associated with the misidentification of suspects by an eyewitness during a criminal investigation. An individual is said to feel the effects of verbal overshadowing when verbal descriptions conflict with the cognitive visualization of the subject in discussion. This means when a person is instructed to verbally describe to another individual a person, place, thing, tactile, or scent, it has a negative impact on their ability to later recall, an accurate description. The discovery that prior verbal description has implications on the ability to recognize and accurately remember facial details can be traced back to researchers Jonathan Schooler and Tonya Engstler-Schooler during their eyewitness testimony research in 1990; they are the original researchers who coined the phrase verbal overshadowing effect.

Eye Witness Testimony

There has always been concern about eyewitness testimony because the result of trials can incriminate potentially innocent victims for crimes they did not commit. The court systems decided upon 5 factors that determined the reliability of eyewitness testimony, in an effort to combat the misidentification of innocent people. Ability to view criminal, duration from the crime to identification, self-confidence of description, consistency of description, and accuracy of description were examples of the factors that courts agreed would be the criteria to judge of a witness’s accuracy. Unfortunately, these factors are often disputed because several researchers believe the accuracy is compromised due to verbalization of description. When Jonathan and Tonya Engstler-Schooler conducted an experiment on the effects that writing and talking about facial descriptions have on later ability to recall accurate details, they found that there was a strong correlation with negative recalling of events when participants were asked to pick a face that matched their description. This experiment has been proven to show similar results in replicated experiments and as a result, it has been a frequently used source for research about eyewitness and facial recognition. Several studies hypothesize that the reason witnesses have a difficult time verbally describing facial descriptions to investigators is due to the limitations of words used to describe a face. This limitation causes witnesses to remember faces differently because a word used to describe a facial feature can have different meanings attached to it.

Replication Problems

Researchers are confident that they can prevent this effect from interfering with future cases that involve eyewitness testimony by first telling the witness about this phenomenon and explaining in great detail. By informing witnesses about the verbal overshadowing effect, they are able to have a better chance, and slightly smaller error rate, at incorrectly picking out the suspect. Unfortunately, informing witnesses about this effect will not completely prevent suspects from being wrongly picked in a line up because the knowledge only makes a minimal difference. This could explain why researchers have been having difficulty duplicating the verbal overshadowing effect from its first study in 1990 because humans are adapting throughout time, and have become aware of more information and knowledge that can help make slight decreases in inaccuracy. There is debate concerning the verbal overshadowing effect because researchers believe that verbal facilitating, or verbal descriptions, can have a positive impact on the ability to recall accurately, under specified condition. For both verbal overshadowing and verbal facilitating, duration between verbal description and ability to cognitively recall descriptions plays a significant role in the degree of error. It was observed that when descriptions were verbally described before recall, there was a greater chance for error because of the verbal overshadowing effect. On the other hand, waiting a couple of days before a verbal description increases the amount of details that people were able to recall; which explains the support of verbal description within a specified time frame.