Do Image Variability and Names in Missing Person Appeals Improve Prospective Person Memory?

Abstract

Prospective person memory is implicated in searches for missing or wanted individuals. We investigated whether prospective person memory is improved by associating the target of the search with a name and providing photos that reflect variation in the search target's appearance. Participants (N = 242) studied three photographs of each target, taken either at the same event (low variability) or at different events (high variability). For half of the participants, a name was presented alongside the photographs. Both names and high variability photos improved discriminability, suggesting that public appeals for a missing or wanted person should include a name and use images that are representative of the person's variability in appearance across different contexts.

The Geneva Space Cruiser: a fully self-administered online tool to assess prospective memory across the adult lifespan

“…One of the first behavioural studies in this area was conducted by Logie and Maylor (2009) using a single-item online task to assess PM in the context of a BBC TV programme (i.e., participants had to remember to click on a smiley-face at the end of a questionnaire). Only a handful of studies have since relied on online testing to assess PM in a similar, single-item paradigm (Horn & Freund, 2020) or in a more fine-grained manner using paradigms with multiple prospective items (Gilbert, 2015a(Gilbert, , 2015bGladwin et al, 2020;Juncu et al, 2020;Scarampi & Gilbert, 2020). Although these studies suggest (or at least assume) that PM can be assessed reliably in an online setting, it is important to highlight that they did not comprehensively examine the psychometric properties of their task, as they, for example, did not include any laboratory measures of PM that would allow for comparisons with online performance.…”

Reporting missing children to the police: A qualitative exploration of the factors associated with contacting or not contacting the police

“…The number of individuals that the original missing child appeal could reach would, therefore, increase significantly in a short time frame compared to offline approaches such as door to door enquiries (Hunt et al, 2019). Whilst the wide usage and dissemination of publicity appeals ranges from newspaper notices to posters and websites to name a few (Drivsholm et al, 2017), researchers (e.g., Hunt et al, 2020;Juncu et al, 2020;Lampinen and Moore, 2016) have only recently begun exploring how effective these appeals are in being able to help locate a missing child. argue that whilst the ability to disseminate missing person appeals widely and quickly have a great deal of importance, there are a series of underlying stages which must be followed for a missing person appeal to be effective.…”