Contextual effects on prospective person memory

To assist with missing person investigations, the public may be on the lookout during their everyday activities and alert the authorities if the person is encountered. In this Registered Report, participants encoded posters that included an image of a target person along with relevant, irrelevant, or no contextual information about that person. After viewing a poster, participants watched a video that included either the target or a plausible nontarget, using a new experimental paradigm that kept all other conditions of the encounter constant. Previous findings suggest contextual information could affect prospective person memory in several ways. If contextual cues are relevant, they could direct attention to targets and plausible nontargets without improving face recognition and hence have no effect on discriminability (sighting bias hypothesis). Alternatively, any contextual information at encoding (relevant or irrelevant) could encourage deeper processing of each target’s identity and improve sighting discriminability (elaborative encoding hypothesis). A third possibility is that associating a target with relevant contextual information improves both face recognition and attention, resulting in greater sighting discrimination compared with irrelevant or no contextual information (context matching hypothesis). We tested 396 participants and found that associating target faces with contextual information had no significant effect on discriminating between targets and plausible nontargets. The context manipulation also had no significant effect on response bias. Our findings suggest that the previously reported recognition advantage might depend on the kind of contextual information at encoding, on how targets are encountered during testing, as well as on the type of recognition task.