ABSTRACT

Missing person posters ask the public to monitor their environment for missing people and alert the authorities if they are encountered. Here, a single laboratory-based study examined whether the number of missing person posters someone sees, the number of times the posters are seen, and the time delay between seeing the posters and later encountering the missing people from them all influence the likelihood of the missing people being recognised and authorities alerted. To examine this, participants saw four or 12 missing person posters once, three, or five times and were asked to alert the researchers if any missing people later appeared in the study. Shortly after, or after a minimum of a 24-hr delay, the participants had to sort pictures of 40 people by gender. Four of these 40 people had appeared on the missing person posters. Participants were more likely to recognise the missing people and alert the researchers of this when they had seen four posters three or five times and when the missing people were encountered shortly after seeing the posters. When the posters were seen once, however, the number of posters seen did not impact performance. The applied implications of these findings are discussed.

摘要

失踪人员海报要求公众监控失踪人员的环境，并在遇到失踪人员时通知当局。在这里，一项基于实验室的研究检查了某人看到的失踪人员海报的数量、看到海报的次数以及看到海报和后来遇到失踪人员之间的时间延迟是否都会影响失踪的可能性。失踪人员被认出并通知当局。为了检查这一点，参与者一次、三或五次看到四到十二张失踪人员海报，并被要求提醒研究人员是否在研究中稍后出现任何失踪人员。不久之后，或至少延迟 24 小时后，参与者必须按性别对 40 个人的照片进行分类。这 40 人中有 4 人出现在失踪人员海报上。当参与者看到四张海报三到五次以及在看到海报后不久遇到失踪人员时，他们更有可能认出失踪人员并提醒研究人员这一点。然而，当海报被看到一次时，看到的海报数量不会影响性能。讨论了这些发现的应用意义。