Reflection

Missing person alerts: does repeated exposure decrease their effectiveness?

James Michael Lampinen1 & Kara N. Moore1

Published online: 8 June 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Abstract Objectives Prospective person memory refers to situations where one is asked to be on the lookout for a missing or wanted individual. Some researchers have hypothesized that because people see missing person alerts for multiple people over a period of time, that people habituate to missing persons alerts much like they do to car alarms. The purpose of this research was to test that hypothesis. Methods Some participants saw three different mock missing person videos, depicting three different target individuals, with one video being shown on each of 3 days (Monday, Wednesday, Friday). Other participants engaged in unrelated tasks on the first 2 days and saw a single mockmissing person video on the third day. All participants were told that if they saw a person from a mock missing person video and contacted the experimenters they would win a cash prize. On the final day of the study, the target individual was located in the hallway a short distance from the experiment room in a location that participants had to pass on their way out of the building. Results Correct sightings of the target individual were significantly lower in the multiple video condition than in the single video condition. Conclusions The results suggest that overuse of missing person alert systems can decrease their effectiveness in a manner consistent with a Bcar alarm^ effect.

Keywords Missing persons . AMBER alerts . Prospective personmemory

At any given time, there are approximately 85,000 active missing persons investiga- tions in the United States (National Crime Information Center 2015). Approximately

J Exp Criminol (2016) 12:587–598 DOI 10.1007/s11292-016-9263-1

* James Michael Lampinen [email protected]

1 216 MEMH, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA

half of those cases involve juveniles under the age of 21 years. A common approach used in these cases is for law enforcement to release photographs of the missing person through the media in order to enlist the help of the public in finding the missing person (Pashley et al. 2010). The best-known example of these programs is AMBER alerts (Gier et al. 2011). AMBER stands for BAmerica’s Missing Broadcast Emergency Response^. The program calls for the issuance of public alerts when certain pre- conditions exist: (1) law enforcement believes an abduction has occurred, (2) law enforcement believes that the child is in imminent risk of death or bodily injury, (3) there is enough descriptive information about the child and/or incident to believe that an AMBER alert would be helpful, (4) the abductee is under the age of 18, and (5) information has been entered into the National Crime Information Center database (U.S. Department of Justice 2015). In a typical year there are about 200 AMBER alerts issued in the United States (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children 2014). Missing person alerts are issued in adult missing person cases as well (Petonito and Muschert 2015).

Recently, some criminal justice researchers have been critical of AMBER alert systems, claiming that they are primarily Bcrime control theater^ rather than an actually useful program (Griffin et al. 2007). One argument made by these critics is that AMBER alerts are issued in cases where the child is not really in any imminent danger of serious physical injury or death (Griffin et al. 2007). Additionally, these researchers have suggested that AMBER alerts are overused, and that this might theoretically lead members of the general public to habituate to the alerts and tune them out (Griffin et al. 2007). An analogy can be made to how repeated exposure to car alarms causes members of the general public to ignore car alarms when they go off. However, despite these speculations, there is currently no empirical evidence that addresses this issue. The purpose of the present research is to fill this gap in the literature.

Searches for missing or wanted persons rely in part on a type of memory called prospective person memory (Lampinen et al. 2009; Lampinen and Moore 2016). Prospective person memory is a special case of event-based prospective memory. In an event-based prospective memory task, participants are provided with one or more prospec- tive memory cues and are asked to make a particular response if they encounter the cues in the future (Einstein and McDaniel 1990). Participants then engage in an attention- demanding ongoing task. During the course of the task, they will sometimes encounter the prospective memory cues. Prospective memory occurs to the extent that they remember to engage in the response upon encountering the cue. For instance, participants might be given a particular word (e.g., APPLE) and then told to hit the B∼^ key if they encounter the word in the future. Participants might then be given a long list of words with instructions to rate the pleasantness of the words. Sometime during the course of the task, the word BAPPLE^ will occur. Successful prospective memory occurs to the degree that participants remember to hit the B∼^ when encountering the target word. In prospective person memory, the prospective memory target is a particular person’s face. The prospective memory response is to contact authorities. The ongoing task is simply the person’s day-to-day life.

Performance on prospective person memory tasks is often quite poor. For instance, in Lampinen et al. (2009), students in Introductory Psychology classes were shown photographs of two individuals and were told that if they saw either person and contacted their instructor they could win a portion of a $100 prize. Two days later, one of the target individuals showed up in class under the pretense that he was

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delivering copies to the instructor. He then turned, facing the class, said BGood morning^ in a loud voice and paused for a few seconds before leaving. Only about 5 % of students ended up reporting a sighting to their instructor. In a later lineup task, the vast majority of students were able to pick the target out of the lineup, indicating that the failure to spot the individual did not reflect a failure of encoding the target’s face into memory.

In a more recent study, Lampinen et al. (2016) told participants that they were taking part in a study of media psychology. In two experiments, participants watched what they were told were recent local news stories produced by student journalists. Following each news story, participants were asked to provide ratings of the stories on a number of dimensions (e.g., BHow important is the story?^). Two of the videos were actually local news stories, but the third was a realistic mock wanted-person alert, purportedly about a person wanted by police in connection to a robbery that occurred near campus. After rating this third video, participants were told that the individual was not actually wanted by police, but if they saw the individual and contacted the experimenters, they could win a prize of up to $200. The target individual later appeared in a location at the students’ campus dining hall that participants had to pass in order to enter the dining hall. In Experiment 1, none of the participants who ate lunch in the dining hall spotted the target individual, and in Experiment 2, slightly less than 3 % of participants who ate lunch in the dining hall spotted the target individual.

There is good evidence that prospective person memory is often poor in real-life searches too. For instance, MacLin et al. (2010) examined called-in tips to a television show focusing on finding wanted persons. Viewers saw a show depicting a male fugitive and were encouraged to call the show if they had any information about him. The show received many tips, but most of these tips were in error. The man was eventually apprehended in the Southern U.S., but callers claimed to have seen him in the Midwest, West, Northeast, as well as in the South.

Recently, Lampinen and Moore (2016) proposed a model designed to explain why performance is often so poor in prospective person memory tasks. According to the model, successful performance on prospective person memory tasks requires that a set of pre-conditions be met before successful prospective person memory can occur. These pre-conditions include (1) the person must encounter the alert, (2) the person must attend to the alert, (3) the person must encounter the target individual, (4) the person must attend to the target individual, (5) a reminding must occur, and (6) the person must decide to take action. Failure of any one of these preconditions will result in failure of prospective person memory. In terms of the present study, a key question is what effect repeated missing person alerts is likely to have on prospective person memory. More specifically, during a period of time, people are likely to encounter missing person alerts multiple times, for multiple missing individuals, most of whom they will never encounter. What is the cumulative effect of these repeated exposures on the effectiveness of these alerts?

In the context of this model, it is likely that repeated exposure to missing person alerts might reduce the effectiveness of the alerts. One way of thinking about this is simply in terms of habituation (Rankin et al. 2009). Habituation refers to a reduction in responsiveness to a stimulus that is repeated over time and is a very basic and universal form of learning. Research suggests that habituation occurs not just in response to identical stimuli but to stimuli that are sufficiently similar (i.e., stimulus generalization).

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In the context of repeated missing person alerts, although people may encounter alerts depicting different individuals, and although the details of the alerts are likely to differ, they are likely to be sufficiently similar to produce stimulus generalization and habit- uation. To the extent that viewers repeatedly see alerts, it is likely that their attention to the alerts might be diminished, as might their vigilance in looking for the target individuals.

However, habituation alone does not fully capture what has been described as the Bcar alarm effect.^ This is because members of the public who encounter multiple missing person alerts over a period of time are not merely being repeatedly exposed to a stimulus; rather, the person is likely experiencing a repeated association between encountering an alert and then later failing to encounter the missing person. That is, they are likely learning that alerts are often associated with a lack of opportunity to encounter the missing person. As such, repeated exposures to alerts are likely to be de- motivating, precisely because it is a rare event for someone to encounter an alert and then later encounter the missing person. In this context, Reasoned Action Theory (Fishbein and Ajzen 1975) would predict that repeated exposure to missing person alerts might decrease the effectiveness of the alerts. According to Reasoned Action Theory, the probability of engaging in an action (e.g., looking for a missing person) is a function of one’s attitude toward the outcome and one’s beliefs about the probability of achieving the outcome. Research indicates that people often believe that the probability of successfully encountering a missing person is low (Lampinen et al. 2016). To the extent that one repeatedly encounters a missing person alert and then fails to encounter the missing person, it seems likely that belief in the probability of encounter will decrease, resulting in a decreased motivation on the task.

To examine the potential of a Bcar alarm^ effect in a controlled fashion, we conducted the present research. Participants saw either a single mock missing person alert or three different mock missing person alerts, showing three different target individuals, over the course of a week. In both conditions, participants were told that if they spotted the Bmissing^ individual they would win a share of a $200 prize. In the condition in which there was a single mock missing person alert, the target individual was standing in the hallway around the corner from the experiment room in a location that students had to walk by as they left. In the three-video condition, no target individual was present for the first two videos, but was after the third video. We hypothesized that participants in the single-video condition would outperform partici- pants in the three-video condition.

Methods

Participants

A total of 501 participants completed the first day of the experiment. Twenty-two participants (4.39 % of total) did not show up for all 3 days of the study and were excluded from analyses. Thirteen of these participants were in the three-video condition and nine of these participants were in the one-video condition. Twelve participants (2.39 % of total) did not have a chance to encounter our confederate. One participant was excluded because the confederate’s cover was inadvertently blown by a fellow

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research assistant while the participant was exiting the lab hallway. One participant reported knowing our confederate and was excluded from analysis. Therefore 465 participants were included in the analyses reported in the results section.

Materials and procedure

Participants partook in a 3-day (MWF) study that included an array of cognitive psychology experiments. Participants were randomly assigned to view three mock missing persons videos, each showing a different Bmissing^ person, over the course of 3 days or one mock missing person video on the last day of the study. Participants who were assigned to the three-video condition watched a mock missing person video at the end of their session on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Participants who were assigned to the one-video condition did not watch a mock missing person video on Monday or Wednesday but did on Friday.

Prior to viewing each video, participants were told that the video was not real, but was part of a contest in which they could win up to $200. Each mock missing person video was a realistic mock missing persons alert concerning a young woman from the local area who had gone missing. Each mock missing person video contained a photograph of a woman. Each video lasted 33 s, with the woman’s photograph visible for 20 s. The photographs in the mock missing persons videos for Monday and Wednesday were of women who were undergraduate students at a university in another state. These photographs were used to ensure that participants would not have a chance to encounter the targets (i.e., the women in the photographs) on Monday and Wednesday. The woman in the photograph in the mock missing person video for Friday was an undergraduate research assistant who acted as a confederate for this study (see Fig. 1).

A survey followed each of the mock missing persons videos. The survey accompa- nying each missing persons video asked participants to briefly describe the video. After answering the question about the video, participants saw a screen that reminded them that the news story was not real but was part of a contest. They were told that the person

Fig. 1 Screen shot of photograph of confederate shown in mock missing persons video

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depicted in the video would be on campus in the next week and that if they saw the person and contacted the experimenters at [email protected]^ they would win a portion of a $200 prize to be split among all who made an identification. Participants were also told that if they saw the person they should not tell anyone else, or their portion of the prize would be smaller. Following these instructions, we probed the participants’ understanding of the instructions. In particular, we asked participants to indicate the e-mail address that they should use to contact experimenters. We also asked participants to indicate how likely they believed it was that they would be in the same location as the target person in the next week using a six-point scale that ranged from Bvery unlikely^ to Bvery likely .̂ Finally, participants were asked to indicate whether they had formed the specific intent to look for the target individual using a four-point scale ranging from Bnot at all^ to Bvery much so^.

Following the completion of the experiment on each day, participants were dismissed one-by-one by the experimenter. On the last day of experiment (Friday), our confederate was stationed in the hallway right around the corner from our lab room, approximately 49 ft and six inches from the door of the experiment room. The confederate was instructed to make sure that her face was fully visible, to act naturally, and to not make eye contact or otherwise draw undue attention to herself. All participants had to pass by the area in which the confederate was standing in order to exit the experiment room area. Therefore, all participants had a chance to see the confederate right after watching the video with her photograph in it.

If participants contacted us to report a sighting, they were asked to fill out a short survey in order to verify their sighting. The sighting survey asked participants to describe the appearance of the person, what the person was wearing, and the location of the person. Participants were also asked whether there was anything in particular that helped them spot the individual and a few questions to ensure that they spotted the individual on their own and did not tell anyone else about spotting the individual.

Results

Missing person details On the survey immediately after seeing the video, participants were asked to summarize the main points of the news story. On day 1 (95.8 %), day 2 (99.1 %), and day 3 (97.7 %), the vast majority of participants correctly indicated that the target was being sought because she was missing.

Prospective person memory Participants viewed one or three mock missing persons video(s). On the last day of the experiment, the confederate shown in the mock missing persons video was stationed outside the lab room in a hallway that participants had to pass to exit the experiment room area. Participants were asked to report any sightings of the target individual(s) by e-mailing the experimenters at [email protected]^, in order to win prize money of up to $200. There were a total of 23 correct sightings in the one-video condition and 11 correct sightings in the three-video condition. As shown in Fig. 2, there were significantly more sightings reported by participants in the one video condition (10 %) than by participants in the three video condition (4.68 %), χ2(1, N = 465) = 4.85, p = 0.28, = −.10, p = 0.028. There were a total of five mistaken sightings of someone who was not the target in the first video, eight mistaken

592 J.M. Lampinen, K.N. Moore

sightings of someone who was not the target in the second video, and one mistaken sighting of someone who was not the target in the third video.

Intentions to look and expectancy of encounter Participants were asked to indicate the degree to which they formed a specific intent to look for each target and how likely they thought it was that they would encounter the target individual(s). As can be seen in Fig. 3, for participants in the three video condition, intent to look for the targets

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

Three VideosOne Video

% P

ro p

ec ti

ve P

er so

n M

em o

ry

Fig. 2 Percent prospective person memory as a function of number of missing person videos seen

Fig. 3 Mean rating of intent to look for missing person as a function of number of missing person videos seen

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decreased across the week long period, F(2, 406) = 49.88, p < 0.001, ηp 2 = 20. Pairwise

comparisons revealed that participants in the three video condition formed a higher intent to look for the missing person on day 1 (M = 2.84, SE = .06) than on day 2 (M = 2.53, SE = .06) and participants formed a higher intent to look for the missing person on day 2 (M = 2.53, SE = .06) than on day 3 (M = 2.34, SE = .06), p’s < 0.001. Participants in the one-video condition formed a higher intent to look for the confed- erate on day 3 (M = 2.78, SE = .05) than participants in the three-video condition on day 3 (M = 2.33, SE = .05), F(1, 461) = 34.57, p < 0.001, ηp

2 = 07. As can be seen in Fig. 4, for participants in the three-video condition, expectations of

being in the same location as the targets decreased across the week-long period, F(2, 422) = 34.05, p < 0.001, ηp

2 = 14. Pairwise comparisons revealed that the participants in the three-video condition had higher expectations of being in the same location as the target on day 1 (M = 2.80, SE = .08) than on day 2 (M = 2.28, SE = .08) or day 3 (M = 2.23, SE = .08), p’s < 0.001. There was not a significant difference between expectations of being in the same location as the target on day 2 or day 3. Participants in the one-video condition had higher expectations of being in the same location as the confederate on day 3 (M= 2.66, SE = .08) than participants in the three- video condition on day 3 (M= 2.24, SE = .08), F(1, 462) = 15.25, p < 0.001, ηp

2 = 03. We found a significant correlation between self-reported intent to look and whether

participants made a sighting, r(463) = .10, p = 0.025. We found a significant correlation between people’s expectations of being in the same location as the Bmissing person^ and sighting reports, r(464) = .20, p < 0.001. We found a significant correlation be- tween intent to look and expectations of encounter, r(463) = .37, p < 0.001.

Fig. 4 Mean rating of expectancy of encountering a missing person as a function of number of missing person videos seen

594 J.M. Lampinen, K.N. Moore

Discussion

When a person goes missing, police will sometimes seek the aid of the public by releasing the person’s photograph and other relevant information to the news media in hopes that someone will spot the individual and alert authorities (Pashley et al. 2010). Such programs rely in part on a type of event-based prospective memory called prospective person memory (Lampinen et al. 2009; Lampinen and Moore 2016). In the past decade, some criminal justice researchers have questioned the utility of missing person alert programs, at least partly arguing that missing person alert systems are overused and that this might cause members of the general public to tune them out, that is, the Bcar alarm^ effect. The purpose of the present research was to provide empirical evidence addressing this issue.

The present research provides some evidence that exposing people to repeated missing person alerts, each showing a different target individual, can indeed decrease people’s responsiveness to future missing person alerts. Participants in the single video condition correctly spotted the Bmissing person^ approximately 10 % of the time. Yet, when participants had seen two prior mock missing person alerts earlier in the week, identification rates fell to less than 5 % of the time. Repeated presentation of missing person alerts decreased participants’ intention to look for the missing person and also reduced participants’ expectations that they would later encounter the Bmissing^ person. Both of these ratings were significantly correlated with probability of spotting and reporting the target individual.

The present research thus demonstrates that overuse of missing person alerts may cause members of the general public to habituate to the alerts, decreasing their effectiveness. However, it is not altogether clear how many alerts is too many. Slightly fewer than 200 AMBER alerts are released in any given year (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children 2014). Given that most AMBER alerts are issued at the state level, and given that there are 50 states, this amounts to an average of somewhat less than four AMBER alerts per year per state. However, there is a great deal of variability between states in terms of the number of alerts issued in any given year. For instance, in 2013, Texas released 37 AMBER alerts, close one-fifth of all the AMBER alerts issued in the United States (see Fig. 5). Texas is a very populous state; however, even so, this number of alerts is disproportionate to the population of the state. The population of Texas is slightly less than 10 % of the population of the United States and about 8 % of the child (<18) population of the United States, but accounted for 19 % of the AMBER alerts in 2013. Similarly, Georgia issued 18 AMBER alerts in 2013, which is approximately 9 % of all AMBER alerts issued in 2013. This is despite the fact that Georgia’s population is only approximately 3 % of the U.S. population and approximately 3 % of the child population of the United States. Other states issue a low number of AMBER alerts. For instance, in Illinois there were only three AMBER alerts issued in 2013. It may well be that repeated exposure effects may be more of a problem in states with a disproportionate number of AMBER alerts.

Public-policy officials may want to think about strategies to overcome this. One option may be to release AMBER alerts to more specific geographical areas or release fewer AMBER alerts in order to increase chances of sightings. Striking the appropriate balance is by no means an easy task for law enforcement, given that they are required to make these decisions quickly in real time and given the possible costs associated with

Missing person alerts 595

making the wrong call. The present research is aimed at assisting law enforcement in making these tough calls by providing a better empirical basis for making these decisions.

Although missing child alerts are perhaps the best-known type of missing person alerts, they are not the only type. There has been a rapid increase in recent years of missing person alerts aimed at recovering missing adults who have diminished capacity (Petonito and Muschert 2015). Media alerts may also be issued for missing adults who are not of diminished capacity but who are believed to be endangered for other reasons. Thus the aggregate number of missing person alerts in a community includes all of these alert types and may at times be quite large. For example, in 2013, there were close to 162 alerts for missing adults issued in the state of Florida, with an average of 13.5 alerts issued per month (Florida Department of Elder Affairs 2016). In December of 2013 there were 25 such alerts issued in the state of Florida. Consistent with this, K.N Moore and J.M. Lampinen, 2015, unpublished found that close to 10 % of respondents indicated that they saw some sort of missing person alert 2–3 times per week. The above suggests that high exposure to missing person alerts may be of concern for some people in some locations. The present research found that three alerts in the course of a week may limit the amount of attention paid to the third alert, and our prior research found that six alerts issued in the course of 6 weeks produced a similar effect (for a discussion, see Lampinen and Moore 2016). Further work is needed to more fully establish the boundary conditions of this effect.

Prior research has found that people are often poor at recognizing individuals that they have been asked to be on the lookout for (for a review, see Lampinen

Fig. 5 Number of AMBER alerts per state as a function of child population of each state

596 J.M. Lampinen, K.N. Moore

and Moore 2016). The present research confirms those prior findings. Even though our participants walked right by the target individual minutes after viewing their photograph, less than 10 % of individuals actually identified the target. These findings are consistent with a large body of research showing that people often fail to notice what most people would expect to be noticeable events, such as a gorilla in the midst of a bunch of people passing a basketball (Simons and Chabris 1999), or dollar bills hanging from a tree (Hyman et al. 2014). A major focus of future research should be to overcome these attentional limitations.

Developing better approaches to finding missing persons is a major societal concern. In the present research, we demonstrated that overuse of missing person alert systems can decrease their effectiveness. This implies that it is important for law enforcement to balance the need for wide dissemination of missing person alerts with the potential downside of overusing alerts. Public policy regarding missing persons can be better informed by solid evidence based approaches in order to achieve this balance.

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James Michael Lampinen Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor of Psychological Science at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, U.S.A. He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Northwestern University in 1996. Dr. Lampinen’s work focuses on applications of basic research on memory and face perception to legal issues including eyewitness identification, missing and wanted persons, and forensic age progression. He is author of two books, The Psychology of Eyewitness Identification, published by Psychology Press and Memory 101, published by Springer. His work is funded by grants from the National Science Foundation.

Kara N. Moore M.A., is a doctoral candidate in Experimental Psychology at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville AR, U.S.A. Kara’s research focuses on the cognitive mechanisms underlying the search for missing persons and the development of the use of metacognitive strategies to reject false memories. Most recently, Kara has conducted American Psychological and Law Society funded research on the role of expectations of encountering missing persons on locating missing persons.

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