Have You Seen Me? The science behind memory and missing person posters.
By H. Havelock
In the 1980s, the faces of children that have gone missing started to appear on the side of milk cartons as part of a campaign initiated by the National Children's Safety Council in an effort to bring missing children home. Since then, we have seen the emergence of Amber Alerts, Ashanti Alerts, and Silver Alerts. Social media is a tool often used by missing persons' families. However, no matter the medium of effort, the same crucial question is asked: Have you seen this person? If seen by the right person who has answers, it could be a matter of life or death in some cases.
In 2005, Amber Deahn was working a regular shift at a Denny's when she spotted a little girl eating aside an older man. The little girl appeared familiar to Amber, she told the Washington Post. The face of the girl was the same face she had seen earlier on a missing person poster. The waitress alerted authorities and it was discovered that the little girl was Shasta Groene. “It clicked in my brain that she looks familiar,” she told the Seattle Times.
Shasta had been abducted from her parent's home along with her little brother for more than 6 weeks before she was recognized. Shasta was able to be located and saved as a result of a missing person poster. Her little brother was not located and was presumed to be dead and at the time of her abduction, her family members had been murdered.
Researchers have looked into the role that prospective memory plays in someone's ability, prospective memory, is the ability to remember and execute delayed intentions when a particular cue is encountered. This is the same process that is life-saving when it comes to missing-person posters. One has to be able to not just see the poster, but be able to remember what to look for and what to do once they encounter the missing person poster.
However, one study conducted by Lampien & Mooore, it was shown that we might not be that good at it. It was found that when a "missing person" was introduced to a set of participants and later was nearby, fewer than 20% of the participants were able to recognize the missing person.
There are a few factors for this, and by understanding them we may be able to change the way we not only go about searching for missing person cases but understand the crucial steps in memory when it comes to the search.
According to one study, The Role of Attention and Memory in Search for Missing Persons published by the University of Arkansas, "Seeing the missing person does not guarantee a sighting.. if a searcher sees a missing person but is not searching, one of the conditions for automatic recall must be present. Otherwise, the searcher could see the missing person but not remember that they were searching for them or not pay enough attention to allow for recognition."
Automatic recall is defined by the American Psychological Association as the ability to transfer prior learning or past experience to current consciousness.
One key factor in this process, according to the study, is the expectation that one will encounter the missing person. Maybe the question on posters should be, " Will you see this person, under the right conditions?"
If a person does not feel like it is likely that they will run into a missing person, they may not look. This affects prospective memory and recalls even if you do run into the missing person you saw on the poster earlier. "The expectancy theory states that the motivation to perform a task is influenced by people's expectations about the success rate of performing the task, the difficulty of the task, and how rewarding successfully performing the task is... Therefore, the lower a person's expectations are, the less likely they are to search for them. If a successful prospective person's memory requires attentional resources, then a person with a low expectation of encounter is unlikely to devote the attentional resources necessary and therefore is unlikely to be successful at encountering missing persons.", the study stated.
The next time you encounter a missing person poster, will you ask yourself how likely is it that I will run into this person?
Another factor highlighted in the study is strategic monitoring. Strategic monitoring is monitoring the environment for the occurrence of a certain target, in relation to sighting a missing person, it is unlikely that every person is strategically looking for the missing person, but if they are in perhaps a search group the study showed that this "quadrupled sighting rates."
This study asked participants to recognize a missing person under varying sets of conditions to better understand strategic monitoring. Researchers presented participants with a cash prize for sightings. They "manipulated strategic monitoring by covertly reminding some participants to look for the missing person." Overall, the study found that 'Strategic monitoring had a larger effect on sightings but did not cause a ceiling effect, suggesting a role for facial recognition and other factors in determining sighting rates.”
Researchers at The University of Arkansas analyzed missing children posters published by The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and found that 12% of posters contained multiple images of the missing child. Using these posters the researchers studied the impact of seeing multiple images of the misisng person on both prospective and retrospective memory.
Retrospective memory is used when a missing person might be recognized after someone has seen them on a poster, the reverse of prospective where someone initally see’s the missing person poster and then the missing person. Researchers found that “ The advantage of presenting multiple images over presenting a single image was weaker for retrospective memory than prospective memory.”
Prospective memory is not the only kind of memory that is used in awareness of missing person cases. A person might first see the missing person then later on encounter the person that they saw on the missing person poster, this is known as retrospective memory.n In this case, facial recognition is also a vital process according to a study published by The Univeristy of Arkansas. These findings also showed that presenting multiple images combatted the fact that images chosen might not fit the appearance of the child when encountered, revealing that multiple image posters received more “ spurious sightings and potentially wasted police resources tracking down false leads. Having to balance these concerns is unclear. However, it is arguable that increased leads are a good thing even if the police are required to track down some false leads,” the study stated. Seeing multiple images lead to more false sightings, but should we run the risk of not following every lead?
In order to combat the fact that missing persons who have been missing for an extended period of time may look different, police departments may choose to release age-progressed images.
It has been over a year since Oakley Carlson had gone missing. When she was first missing a poster was made of her four-year-old self, now pictured below is an age progression released recently by the Grey Harbor Sheriffs Department, in hopes to bring Oakley home.
Photo Source: Gray Harbor Sheriff’s Office
Age progression effectiveness was examined and compared in both prospective and retrospective memory in the study “ Depicting the Missing: Prospective and Retrospective Person Memory for Age Progressed Images.” It was found that in both cases of memory, there was no significant difference in the use of outdated photographs or age-progressed photos. The researchers state that “ The finding may reflect a belief on the part of participants that age-progressed images should produce a very strong match to memory, whereas for outdated photographs, the participant did not expect the match to be especially good.” The study also brought up like in previous studies that over-specifying what kind of posters may lead to false leads, yet it all comes down to having the right person see it, under the right circumstances, at the right time.
According to the National Unidentified and Missing Person System (NAMUS), over 600 thousand people go missing a year. Behind every single missing person poster is the face of someone who is loved and missed. Although not every single lead may bring someone home, it can bring answers to law enforcement and families. Next time you are walking past a missing person poster on your trip to the grocery store, it may be worth it to ask yourself, “ Have I seen or will I see this missing person?”