**Plan** We plan to test a minimum of 75 participants in each condition (150 participants in total). Data collection will continue until at least 75 participants, who meet the inclusion criteria, have been tested within each condition. We will set a date at which data collection will stop. This approach may take us beyond our planned minimum total number of participants. If so, we will take steps to randomly assign additional participants to maintain roughly equal numbers across the Description and No Description condition. The participant pool available to us has a sizable female base. We therefore anticipate recruiting a sample that is two-thirds female. Subjects will be tested in small groups (5-10 maximum) in a large room. Each participant will be assigned to either the experimental or control group using a pseudo-randomization procedure. Blocked randomization will also be applied. We will use 3 blocks of 50 participants. Within each block 25 participants will be randomly allocated to the experimental condition and 25 participants to the control condition. This procedure will be used to ensure a close to even number of participants is allocated to each group by the end of the data collection period. Participants will be spaced out across the room and boards will be placed between participants to prevent them from seeing each other. Each participant will be sat in front of a computer and wear headphones. We have a dedicated computer laboratory that will accommodate this format of testing. The video will be projected on each individual computer and responses (identification decision and confidence judgments) will be collected through E-Prime computer software on a 3.20 GHz PC with a 17inch screen. We will advertise the study to the undergraduate participant pool we have access to at the University of Leeds, UK. Participants will only be recruited for the study if they meet the following criteria (1) be between 18-25 years old, (2) be a native English Speaker, (3) be white/Caucasian, and (4) have normal or corrected-to-normal vision. We will exclude participants who do not meet the requirements of the study at the time of recruitment. We will also deal with the reasons for exclusion listed below in the following ways: 1. Participants did not follow instructions on the experimental or control task An assessment of whether or not a participant followed the instructions appropriately will be taken by the experimenter. This will occur immediately following the experimental session in which the participant took part. The experimenter will be fully trained in administering the instructions of the task. 2. Participants did not complete all tasks. The experimenter will automatically exclude participants on this basis immediately following the experimental session. 3. The experimenter incorrectly administered the task or instructions. The experimenter will automatically exclude participants on this basis immediately following the experimental session. 4. If following the experimental session a participant reports guessing the purpose of the experiment. A small subset of the undergraduate participant pool population may have prior knowledge of the verbal overshadowing effect due to participation in previous experiments overseen by one of the project contributors. Following the experimental session all participants will be asked to write down their perception of what the experiment was about. We will exclude those participants that have guessed the purpose of the experiment immediately following the experimental session. Data will only be excluded prior to examining the recognition task performance. Any excluded data and the reason for exclusion will be identified and included in the data sets. Our procedure closely follows the procedure given by Schooler and Engstler-Schooler (1990) and will be as follows. Participants will be tested in groups of 5-10 participants. Each participant will be sat at an individual computer station. They will wear headphones for the duration of the experiment and be screened from the view of other participants. All participants will be told by the experimenter that “This experiment consists of four tasks. First, please pay close attention to the following video. When you are ready to watch the video, please wear your headphones and press 'SPACE' to start the video.”. Participants then view the 30-second video depicting a bank robbery on their computer monitor. All further instructions are presented to the participant on the computer screen. In the Experimental Condition participants are asked to: “Please describe the appearance of the bank robber in as much detail as possible. It is important that you attempt to describe all of his different facial features. Please write down everything that you can think of regarding the bank robber’s appearance. When you hear a tone, please stop writing and read the instructions given on your screen. It is important that you try to describe him for the full 5 minutes. Please press 'SPACE' to start the timer and begin the task”. In the control condition participants are asked to: "Please write down as many countries and their capitals as you can at the back of the provided crossword puzzle. When you hear a tone, please stop writing and read the instructions given on your screen. You have 5 minutes to do this task. It is important that you try to name as many countries and their capitals for the full 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, new instructions will appear on the screen. Please press 'SPACE' to start the timer and begin the task". Participants write their descriptions or list of countries and their capitals using pen and paper. After 3 minutes a tone sounds and participants in each group receive the following reminder on the computer screen. Experimental Condition: “Please continue describing every detail of the bank robber. It is important that you provide as full a description as possible”. Control Condition: “Please continue to list countries and their capitals. It is important that you continue this task for the full five minutes. It is important that you continue this task for the full five minutes.” A tone at the end of the 5 minutes will sound to alert participants to stop writing. All participants will then spend 20 minutes working on the provided crossword puzzle. This is a pen and paper task with each participant given a printed copy of the puzzle. A tone sounds at the end of the 20 minutes to alert participants to stop working on the puzzle and to turn their attention back to the computer screen. Participants then view a lineup of 8 faces on the computer screen and attempt to identify the one they saw in the robbery video or report that it wasn’t present. The images are numbered 1-8 to allow a keyboard response. Before the task the following instructions appear on the screen: “Next you will see an lineup with 8 faces. Please identify the individual in the line up who you believe was the bank robber in the video you watched earlier. Please indicate your answer by pressing the corresponding key (1 to 8). If you do not believe the bank robber is present please indicate ‘not present’ by pressing '0'. Press ‘space’ to view the image” Subjects will then rate their confidence in their selection. The following instructions will appear on the computer screen: “Finally,please indicate your confidence in your selection from the lineup on a scale from 1 (guessing) to 7 (certain) by pressing the corresponding key.” As a check that participants were blind to the experimental hypotheses, participants will then be asked the following: "What do you think was the purpose of the experiment. Please write your idea down on the paper in front of you. It is ok to say 'I don't know'". **Departures from our initial plan** We have been able to recruit 130 participants (and not 150 participants as anticipated) within the given time period. Ten participants had to be excluded from the analysis due to the following reasons: (1) four participants performed the control country listing task for either less or more than 5 minutes; (2) one participant took his consent form away; (3) one participant performed the control listing countries task for approximately 1 minute before watching the video; (4) one participant watched the video 1.5 times; (5) one participant did a questionnaire for another study during the crossword puzzle task; (6) two participants did not meet the race criteria. The remaining 120 participants (106 females; mean age: 19.6) are included in the analyses. There are 61 participants in the control condition (50 females; mean age: 19.6) and 59 participants in the description condition (56 females; mean age: 19.5). In spite of such a departure from our initial plan, this still meets the requirements in the approved research protocol of at least 50 participants per condition.