An initial search for visual overshadowing

A consistent, albeit fragile, finding over the last couple of decades has been that verbalization of hard-to-verbalize stimuli, such as faces, interferes with subsequent recognition of the described target stimulus. We sought to elicit a similar phenomenon whereby visualization interferes with verbal recognition--that is, visual overshadowing. We randomly assigned participants (n?=?180) to either concrete (easy to visualize) or abstract (difficult to visualize) sentence conditions. Following presentation, participants were asked to verbalize the sentence, visualize the sentence, or work on a filler task. As predicted, visualization of an abstract verbal stimulus resulted in significantly lower recognition accuracy; unexpectedly, however, so did verbalization. The findings are discussed within the framework of fuzzy-trace theory.