Search efforts and face recognition: the role of expectations of encounter and within-person variability in prospective person memory

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.