Biomedical subjects

C S Dodson

Publications and source records attributed to C S Dodson.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1997

The verbal overshadowing effect: why descriptions impair face recognition.

Three experiments explored the verbal overshadowing effect, that is, the phenomenon that describing a previously seen face impairs recognition of this face. There were three main results: First, a verbal overshadowing effect was obtained both when subjects were provided with and when they generated a description of an earlier seen face. Second, instructing subjects at the time of test to be aware of potentially competing memories did not improve, and may even have worsened, recognition performance when the subjects had generated a description of the target face. However, these instructions improved performance and eliminated the verbal overshadowing effect when subjects were provided with someone else's description of the target face. Third, recognition of the target face was disrupted when subjects described a completely different face, such as their parent's face or a face of the opposite sex. The results are discussed in relation to two potential mechanisms: source confusion between previously encoded visual and verbal representations of the face and a shift in processing of the test faces at recognition.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMed1996

Some problems with the process-dissociation approach to memory.

The process-dissociation framework (L. L. Jacoby, 1991) is a technique for deriving estimates of controlled (e.g., recollection) and automatic (e.g., familiarity) memory processes. The authors examined 3 assumptions of this framework. In Experiment 1, estimates of familiarity were affected by varying the proportion of old targets to old nontargets on the inclusion and exclusion tests and whether or not the tests were completed with full or divided attention, violating the assumption that familiarity's influence is automatic. In Experiment 2, the similarity of old targets and old nontargets was manipulated to show that source confusions (i.e., misrecollections) violate the assumption that the process of recollection is all-or-none. Source confusions also create an imbalance in the influence of recollection on the inclusion and exclusion tests, violating the consistency assumption. The source-monitoring framework is consistent with the present findings.

Attention↗

PubMed1993

Rate of false source attributions depends on how questions are asked.

Lindsay and Johnson (1989) and Zaragoza and Koshmider (1989) report evidence indicating that "eyewitness" subjects are much less likely to falsely claim to have seen information suggested to them verbally when they receive a source monitoring test than when they receive a recognition test requesting only identification of the seen information. The present study reports additional evidence that source misattributions are affected by the nature of the test. Intraub and Hoffman (1992) recently reported the results of a study in which subjects claimed to have seen pictures corresponding to scenes that had only been described in paragraphs they had read. With this paradigm, we found a similar effect using their test, but source confusions were reduced with a test patterned after the one used by Lindsay and Johnson. We attribute this difference in performance to the different decision criteria evoked by these two tests.

Adult↗