?The Misremembrance of Wines Past: Verbal and Perceptual Expertise Differentially Mediate Verbal Overshadowing of Taste Memory,? Joseph M. Melcher and Jonathan W. Schooler, Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 35, no. 2, April 1996, pp. 231-45 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1996.0013). The authors, who are at the University of Pittsburgh, report that:
When participants generate a detailed, memory-based description of complex nonverbal stimuli (e.g., faces) their recognition performance can be worse than nondescribing controls…. The present study explored this hypothesis by examining the impact of verbalization on the wine recognition of individuals of three categories of wine tasting expertise: Non-wine drinkers, untrained wine drinkers, and trained wine experts. Participants tasted a red wine, engaged in either verbalization or an unrelated verbal activity, and then attempted to identify the target wine from among three foils. As predicted, only the untrained wine drinkers showed impaired wine recognition following verbalization. The results are explained in terms of the differential development of perceptual and verbal skills in the course of becoming an expert.
(That’s an excerpt from the article “Soft Is Hard (Further evidence why the ?soft? sciences are the hardest to do well),” Published in AIR 11:1)