Nonlinear effect amplification: Differential susceptibility of verbal overshadowing as a function of time to interference.

Verbalizing visual memories can interfere with later accurate recall.Whereas changes in the magnitude of this Verbal Overshadowing effect as a function of delay have been reported, no study has systematically investigated multiple shorter non-immediate delays.Does VOE happen when verbalization occurs 5-minutes post-encoding?10-minutes?15-minutes?We show in a preregistered study involving 4,501 American adults randomly assigned to different timing paradigms, that the effect size of VOE at 5-or 10-minutes is nearly zero, with a stable and significant inhibitory effect from 15-to 20-minutes.We further investigate this nonlinearity in a second study of 3,174 individuals showing a distinct nonlinear 'effect amplification' sometime between 12-to 14-minutes.This apparent critical period after stimulus onset where susceptibility to verbal interference dramatically increases may help explain potential difficulties replicating VOE.More importantly, it suggests the possibility that the 12-to 14-minute period may represent a critical window for other interference paradigms as well.