title: Turning the Lens of Science on Itself: Verbal Overshadowing, Replication, and Metascience.
abstract: This issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science reports an unprecedented replication effort entailing numerous independent laboratories conducting two versions of the verbal overshadowing paradigm (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990) using different timing intervals. The results (Alogna et al., 2014, this issue) provide unequivocal support for the existence of verbal overshadowing--the finding that describing a previously seen face can impair its subsequent recognition--while simultaneously revealing a number of factors that may have contributed to challenges in replicating verbal overshadowing in the past. In this commentary, I review my participation in this process and consider the implications of the results of this replication effort for verbal overshadowing, the decline effect, and the general goal of metascience: turning the lens of science onto itself.
authors.affiliation: University of California, Santa Barbara jonathan.schooler@psych.ucsb.edu.
authors.forename: Jonathan W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Schooler
mesh_terms: D003415:Crime; D000066499:Facial Recognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D013060:Speech
keywords: decline effect; eyewitness memory; open science; replication; verbal overshadowing