The effects of verbal descriptions on performance in lineups and showups.

Verbally describing a face has been found to impair subsequent recognition of that face from a photo lineup, a phenomenon known as the verbal overshadowing effect (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990). Recently, a large direct replication study successfully reproduced that original finding (Alogna et al., 2014). However, in both the original study and the replication studies, memory was tested using only target-present lineups (i.e., lineups containing the previously seen target face), making it possible to compute the correct identification rate (correct ID rate; i.e., the hit rate) but not the false identification rate (false ID rate; i.e., the false alarm rate). Thus, the lower correct ID rate for the verbal condition could reflect either reduced discriminability or a conservative criterion shift relative to the control condition. In four verbal overshadowing experiments reported here, we measured both correct ID rates and false ID rates using photo lineups (Experiments 1 and 2) or single-photo showups (Experiments 3 and 4). The experimental manipulation (verbally describing the face or not) occurred either immediately after encoding (Experiments 1 and 3) or 20-min after encoding (Experiments 2 and 4). In the immediate condition, discriminability did not differ between groups, but in the delayed condition, discriminability was lower in the verbal description group (i.e., a verbal overshadowing effect was observed). A fifth experiment found that the effect of the immediate-versus-delayed manipulation may be attributable to a change in the content of verbal descriptions, with the ratio of diagnostic to generic facial features in the descriptions decreasing as delay increases. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).