Verbal Overshadowing

First reported by psychologists Jonathan Schooler and Tonya Engstler-Schooler in their 1990 paper "Verbal Overshadowing of Visual Memories", published in Cognitive Psychology. Across six experiments, they demonstrated that verbalizing a previously seen face impaired subsequent recognition, consistent with a "recoding interference hypothesis": verbal descriptions create verbally biased memory representations that interfere with original visual memories. The effect was specific to visual stimuli, with verbal stimuli showing marginal improvement.