And like that, they were gone: A failure to remember recently attended unique faces

Attribute amnesia (AA) is a phenomenon in which participants have difficulty answering an unexpected question about an attended attribute of the most recent target stimulus. A similar situation can occur in cases of real-life eyewitness identification when the eyewitness did not explicitly try to remember the alleged perpetrator's face despite having attended to it. We found that AA is generalizable to novel faces, such that when participants were unexpectedly asked to identify a face, performance was poor, even though they had just attended to that face seconds ago (N = 40 each in an initial experiment and its replication). This finding shows that unexpected face identification is inaccurate even when the face had just been attended to and suffered minimal decay and interference, implying that AA can explain some cases of failure of eyewitness identification that cannot be attributed to a lack of attention or post-event interference.

Automated summary

Attribute amnesia refers to the difficulty participants face in recalling specific details about a recently attended stimulus when unexpectedly asked. This phenomenon can also be observed in real-life situations such as eyewitness identification, where individuals may struggle to remember a face they had just seen. The study found that this attribute amnesia can lead to inaccuracies in face identification, even when minimal decay or interference is present, potentially explaining certain failures in eyewitness identification.