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

该项目旨在通过研究提高公众对失踪人员记忆的方法来帮助调查失踪人员。我们的目标是评估不同类型的信息呈现在一张不熟悉的面孔上对人记忆的影响，利用这些发现来创建一个改进的失踪人员吸引力，并在虚拟现实游戏中测试这种吸引力的有效性。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，每两分钟就有一个人被记录为失踪，其中三分之二的失踪人口年龄在18岁以下（national Policing Improvement Agency, 2011）。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。第一项研究的目的是确定什么样的概念性信息，如职业或心理特征，与一个不熟悉的人的形象相关联，对面部识别最有利。第二项研究旨在比较高可变性感知信息（例如，在不同背景下拍摄的同一个人的多张照片）和概念信息的作用，并评估它们对学习识别陌生面孔过程的综合影响。最后一项研究将结合前两项研究的结果，创建一个改进版本的失踪人员呼吁，并在虚拟现实游戏中测试其有效性，以协助失踪人员调查。

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.