verbal-overshadowing

When putting something into words makes you remember it worse — describe a face, or a wine if you are not a trained taster, and you recognize it less well afterward than if you had said nothing.

The coarse verbal label competes with and overwrites the fine perceptual memory: the word keeps the category and throws away everything finer than the category. It is the mirror image of what words do for number — a symbol holds discrete content perfectly across time but degrades continuous detail. See precise-across-time for the full trade: analog traces drift toward category anchors, discrete handles do not, and naming something sub-categorical can lose the very precision you meant to keep. The effect is real but modest, and weaker for experts, whose words are as fine-grained as their eyes.