Rigid and Non-Rigid Images: Effects on Prospective Person Memory in Missing Persons Cases

Every day in the United States, people are reported missing with the hopes that a recovery will be made using missing person alerts and the help of the public. This paradigm for finding missing persons hinges on the prospective memory of the individuals that see the missing person alert. Prospective person memory (PPM) is a form of event-based prospective memory wherein the “event” is a sighting of the missing person, and the associated action is reporting the sighting to authorities (Lampinen et al., 2009). PPM may be improved through increased facial recognition abilities. Previous research has indicated an increase in facial recognition abilities when presenting participants with multiple images of the target individual (Menon et al., 2015), as well as presenting images of the target individual exhibiting dynamic (non-rigid) motions (Albonico et al., 2015). The purpose of the current study was to determine the ideal format for presenting missing persons alerts in terms of format (video versus static images) and content (rigid versus non-rigid movement). Thus, the study employed a 2 (Modality: Video, Static) X 2 (Motion: Rigid, Non-Rigid) between-subjects design. I hypothesized that the participants in the non-rigid movement, video condition would perform better than all other conditions due to the documented benefits of non-rigid facial expressions and the use of moving images for facial recognition ability. This hypothesis was not supported as participants in the rigid conditions and the static image conditions exhibited significantly higher “hit rates” than participants in either the non-rigid movement or video conditions.