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Updated: May 23, 2026

How to Create and Use Binocular Rivalry
Published on: November 10, 2010
An initial search for visual overshadowing
Kevin R Harris1, Stephen T Paul, Carolyn E Adams-Price
1Department of Psychology, Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, TN 37044-4594, USA. harrisk@apsu.edu
Abstract:
A consistent, albeit fragile, finding over the last couple of decades has been that verbalization of hard-to-verbalize stimuli, such as faces, interferes with subsequent recognition of the described target stimulus. We sought to elicit a similar phenomenon whereby visualization interferes with verbal recognition--that is, visual overshadowing. We randomly assigned participants (n = 180) to either concrete (easy to visualize) or abstract (difficult to visualize) sentence conditions. Following presentation, participants were asked to verbalize the sentence, visualize the sentence, or work on a filler task. As predicted, visualization of an abstract verbal stimulus resulted in significantly lower recognition accuracy; unexpectedly, however, so did verbalization. The findings are discussed within the framework of fuzzy-trace theory.
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