Remembering the Faces of Missing Children: Researcher Suggests How to Improve Recall

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Photos of missing children posted at supermarket exits are one effort by law enforcement agencies and foundations to reunite children and families. Research led by James Michael Lampinen of the University of Arkansas revealed, however, that few customers could identify the children’s faces upon leaving the store.

While better methods of publicizing missing children are needed, Lampinen also suggests ways people can improve their chances of remembering the faces of missing children.

“I think we all get so wrapped up in our day-to-day lives that – even though we care about the problem of missing children – we often don’t take the time to look at the photos of those kids and commit them to memory,” Lampinen said. “As researchers, we should start working on ways of improving people’s attention to these posters.”

Lampinen and co-authors Jack Arnal and Jason L. Hicks report on their research in “The Effectiveness of Supermarket Posters in Helping to Find Missing Children” in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

The researchers surveyed 142 customers as they left a supermarket that posted photos of missing children. The vast majority of respondents called the problem of missing children important or extremely important, yet more than 70 percent did not look at the posters at all, and another 20 percent only looked briefly.

 “Customers at this store displayed no evidence of memory for the children’s pictures,” the researchers reported. “This was true regardless of the importance the customers attached to the issue, the self-reported time spent looking at the pictures, and the customer’s intention to look for the children in the community.”

To remember faces from a poster, people exercise memory known as “prospective person memory.” This type of memory has been little researched. In his university lab, Lampinen has been conducting research to better understand how well people can recognize other people they’ve been told to be on the look-out for, such as wanted fugitives.

Lampinen suggests two simple things people can do to improve their memory for the faces of missing children. First, he suggests, people should take a few minutes to look at the photos of missing children during the next visit to the supermarket, engaging in what is called “implementation intention.”

“Previous research has shown that if you repeat an intention to yourself three times out loud, you can dramatically increase doing whatever it is you intend to do,” Lampinen said.

Lampinen suggested that people look at the faces in the posters holistically.

“One mistake we sometimes make is to try to memorize a face in the same way we memorize a string of words,” Lampinen said. “A string of words you can memorize one word at a time. With a face, you can’t just remember the eyes and then the nose and then the mouth. Rather, faces are best remembered as perceptual wholes. You have to take it all in.”

He suggests that people make qualitative judgments about the face that relate the child’s appearance to their personal life by thinking who the child looks like.

“Try to picture the child’s face in different situations,” Lampinen said. “This can improve the holistic encoding of the face.”

The researchers acknowledge that there is much to be done to improve recognition of missing children. They are currently developing and testing improved methods, including looking at marketing psychology.

“If in-store marketing can increase sales of sodas and snack chips, it seems reasonable to believe that effective approaches can be developed to make the public aware of missing children,” the researchers wrote.

Lampinen is an associate professor of psychology in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. Jack Arnal earned his doctorate in psychology from the University of Arkansas in 2008. Jason L. Hicks is an associate professor of psychology at Louisiana State University.