The verbal facilitation effect: re-reading person descriptions as a system variable to improve identification performance

ABSTRACT

When witnesses report a crime, police usually ask for a description of the perpetrator. Several studies suggested that verbalising faces leads to a detriment in identification performance (verbal overshadowing effect [VOE]) but the effect has been difficult to replicate. Here, we sought to reverse the VOE by inducing context reinstatement as a system variable through re-reading one's own description before an identification task. Participants (N = 208) watched a video film and were then dismissed (control group), only described the perpetrator, or described and later re-read their own descriptions before identification in either target-present or target-absent lineups after a 2-day or a 5-week delay. Identification accuracy was significantly higher after re-reading (85.0%) than in the no description control group (62.5%) irrespective of target presence. Data were internally replicated using a second target and corroborated by several small meta-analyses. Identification accuracy was related to description quality. Moreover, there was a tendency towards a verbal facilitation effect (VFE) rather than a VOE. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses confirm that our findings are not due to a shift in response bias but truly reflect improvement of recognition performance. Differences in the ecological validity of study paradigms are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Verbal facilitation effect
• eyewitness identification
• person description
• context reinstatement
• retention interval

Acknowledgements

The research was conducted at the University of Giessen, Germany, and at the Arizona State University, Phoenix. We would like to thank Colin G. Tredoux for commenting on earlier versions of this manuscript. Special thanks also to Reinhard Bentrup for helping us to create the ROC curves in R. The authors acknowledge that they had no financial interests or benefits that arise from the direct application of their research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Sample sizes of Algona et al.'s (2014) two replication studies varied due to an error in the initial experimental protocol. The replication of the traditional verbal overshadowing condition (cf. Experiment 1; Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990) was conducted as a follow-up experiment and consequently only 22 of the initially participating 31 laboratories completed this experiment.

2. We are indebted to an anonymous reviewer to direct us to pointing out the testing effect as a possible explanation for our results.

3. Odds ratios (OR) > 1 illustrate higher observed frequencies for the context reinstatement condition compared to a particular control group. Odds ratios for the results of Cutler et al.'s (1987) and Cutler et al.'s (1986) studies were converted from the reported d values (for the exact formulae, see Borenstein, 2009).

4. The verbatim definitions used are available from the authors.

5. Unfortunately, 27 free report and specific questions descriptions were lost in the process of moving offices. Thus, only 101 descriptions could be used for these analyses.

6. Effects of verbalisation and re-reading on choosing rates and confidence are available from the first or second author on request. We do encourage future researchers to investigate whether the confidence-accuracy relationship is affected by re-reading, or more generally, by verbalisation of the target's face.