The misremembrance of wines past: Verbal and perceptual expertise differentially mediate verbal overshadowing of taste memory

When participants generate a detailed, memory-based description of complex nonverbal stimuli (e.g., faces) their recognition performance can be worse than nondescribing controls. This effect, termed verbal overshadowing, has been hypothesized to occur in situations in which domain-specific perceptual expertise exceeds verbal expertise. The present study explored this hypothesis by examining the impact of verbalization on the wine recognition of individuals of three categories of wine tasting expertise: Non-wine drinkers, untrained wine drinkers, and trained wine experts. Participants tasted a red wine, engaged in either verbalization or an unrelated verbal activity, and then attempted to identify the target wine from among three foils. As predicted, only the untrained wine drinkers showed impaired wine recognition following verbalization. The results are explained in terms of the differential development of perceptual and verbal skills in the course of becoming an expert. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.