Words Get in the Way

Research shows that language suppresses visual memory, This is called verbal overshadowing and is a well-established phenomenon .... For example, in one study people watched a short videotape of a bank robbery, then spent twenty minutes doing something unrelated. Then one group spent five minutes writing down everything they could remember about the bank robber's face, while the other group did an unrelated task.

Two thirds of the people who wrote nothing down and did unrelated tasks could identify a photograph of the robber, while only one third of the people who wrote verbal descriptions could pick him out, This is a well-established effect; many studies have found exactly the same thing, and some studies have extended the effect to auditory memory as well. People who write down a description of a voice are less able to pick it out from other voices than people who didn't describe the voice in words.

These studies have also found that language doesn't erase visual memories for good; it just suppresses them. When the researchers asked the people who wrote descriptions to do something nonverbal for a while, like work a puzzle or listen to music, their visual memories came back, and they could identify the bank robber's face as well as the people who hadn't written descriptions in the first place.

I think for normal people language is probably a kind of filter. One of the biggest challenges for an animal or an autistic person is dealing with the barrage of details from the environment. Normal people with language don't have to see all those details consciously. But I see them, and animals do, too.

Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin, pg 261

clipped March 15,2005

Collection: Philosophy