Finding the Missing: Effects of Perceptual and Conceptual Information in Missing Person Appeals

该项目旨在通过研究如何改善公众对失踪人员的记忆来帮助调查失踪人员。我们的目标是评估沿陌生面孔呈现的不同类型的信息对人记忆的影响，利用这些发现来创建改进的失踪人员呼吁，并在虚拟现实游戏中测试这种呼吁的有效性。尽管学术研究和媒体对这一问题的报道很少，但国家统计数据显示，在英国，每两分钟就有一人被记录为失踪，三分之二的失踪人员年龄在18岁以下(国家警务改进局，2011年)。寻找失踪人员最常见的方法之一是以海报的形式制作和分发失踪人员呼吁。第一项研究旨在确定什么样的概念信息，如职业或心理特征，与陌生个人的形象有关，对人脸识别最有利。第二项研究旨在比较高变异性知觉信息(例如，同一人在不同背景下拍摄的多张照片)和概念性信息的作用，并评估它们在学习识别陌生面孔的过程中的综合影响。最后一项研究的目的是通过将前两项研究的结果纳入到创建改进版本的失踪人员上诉中，并在虚拟现实游戏中测试其有效性，以帮助失踪人员调查。

This project aims to help missing people investigations by examining ways of improving public's memory for missing individuals. We aim to evaluate the effects of different types of information presented along an unfamiliar face on person memory, to use these findings to create an improved missing person appeal, and to test the effectiveness of this appeal during a virtual reality game. Despite the low coverage of this issue in both academic research and the media, national statistics show that in the UK someone is recorded as missing every two minutes, and two-thirds of the missing people are under 18 years of age (National Policing Improvement Agency, 2011). One of the most common ways of trying to locate missing people is the creation and distribution of missing person appeals in the format of posters. The first study will aim to establish what type of conceptual information, such as occupation or psychological traits, associated with the image of an unfamiliar individual is most beneficial for face recognition. The second study will aim to compare the roles of high-variability perceptual information (e.g. multiple photographs of the same individual, taken in different contexts) and conceptual information and to assess their combined effect on the process of learning to recognize unfamiliar faces. The last study will aim to assist missing people investigations by incorporating the findings of the first two studies into the creation of an improved version of a missing person appeal and testing its effectiveness during a virtual reality game.