Does delay release the verbal overshadowing effect in child and adult eyewitnesses?

The verbal overshadowing effect (VO) (eg, Schooler and Engstler-Schooler, 1990 Cognitive Psychology 22(1) 36–71) suggests that the fact of generating a verbal description of a previously seen face may impair subsequent performance on a lineup identification task in adults. Previous research has examined whether descriptions also impaired children’s identification abilities but no evidence of VO was found (Memon and Rose, 2002 Psychology, Crime and Law 8(3), 229–242). However, the method might not have been appropriate to observe this effect as, for instance, a 24-hour delay between the description and the identification tasks (associated with a release of the VO effect in adults) was used. Hence, in this current experiment, groups of children (7–8, 10–11, 13–14 years old) and adults were presented with a short video and then assigned to a description or a no description condition before the identification task. Participants were also assigned either to a “no delay”, a “24-hour post encoding delay” or a “24-hour post description delay” condition to determine the influence of delay on the VO effect. Results indicated that, compared to the control condition, the description decreased correct identification performance in both children and adults and no release of VO was found with delay.