Prospective Person Memory in the Case of Missing Persons: A Coffee Shop Study

Prospective person memory (PPM) is the process of remembering to perform some action after encountering a target individual, such as identifying and reporting a missing person sighting after viewing a missing person alert (Moore et al., 2021). Research has shown that identification rates generally tend to be low in simulated missing person studies (Lampinen & Moore, 2016b). The purpose of the current research is to determine how to improve missing person recognition rates. This project explores the potential effects of using videos in missing person reports as compared to using static images. However, the hypotheses were not supported as the results showed the rigid static stimulus condition had the best identification performance overall. These findings provide future researchers insight into the process of encoding and recollecting human faces and provide authorities information on the stimuli that is most advantageous to use for real-world missing person cases.