University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA.
Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, USA.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2024 Sep 18;9(1):63. doi: 10.1186/s41235-024-00590-6.
People perform poorly at sighting missing and wanted persons in simulated searches due to attention and face recognition failures. We manipulated participants' expectations of encountering a target person and the within-person variability of the targets' photographs studied in a laboratory-based and a field-based prospective person memory task. We hypothesized that within-person variability and expectations of encounter would impact prospective person memory performance, and that expectations would interact with within-person variability to mitigate the effect of variability. Surprisingly, low within-person variability resulted in better performance on the search task than high within-person variability in Experiment one possibly due to the study-test images being rated as more similar in the low variability condition. We found the expected effect of high variability producing more hits for the target whose study-test images were equally similar across variability conditions. There was no effect of variability in Experiment two. Expectations affected performance only in the field-based study (Experiment two), possibly because performance is typically poor in field-based studies. Our research demonstrates some nuance to the effect of within-person variability on search performance and extends existing research demonstrating expectations affect search performance.
由于注意力和人脸识别失败，人们在模拟搜索中很难找到失踪和被通缉的人。我们在基于实验室和基于现场的前瞻性个人记忆任务中操纵了参与者对遇到目标人的期望和目标人的照片的个体内可变性。我们假设个体内可变性和预期的遭遇会影响前瞻性个人记忆表现，并且期望会与个体内可变性相互作用，以减轻可变性的影响。令人惊讶的是，在实验一中，个体内可变性低的情况下，搜索任务的表现比个体内可变性高的情况下更好，这可能是由于在低可变性条件下，研究-测试图像的评分更相似。我们发现，高可变性的预期效果是在目标的测试图像在所有可变性条件下都相似的情况下产生更多的命中。在实验二中没有可变性的影响。在基于现场的研究（实验二）中，期望仅影响表现，这可能是因为现场研究的表现通常较差。我们的研究表明，个体内可变性对搜索表现的影响存在一些细微差别，并扩展了现有的研究，表明期望会影响搜索表现。
