Who Is Memorable to Whom: A Study of Cognitive Disregard

Cues for cognitive disregard are those attributes of strangers that signify their lack of interest for us. Disregarded strangers are not noticed beyond category level; their invisibility is shown by our failure to recognize them as familiar in a subsequent encounter. Five experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 established the operation of disregard in a lab setting with the finding that subjects had better recall for (photos of) persons with natural relevance to their lives than for other photos to which their attention had been especially directed. In Experiment 2, which compared the recall of undergraduate-aged and elderly subjects for persons of varying ages, it was found that age discrepancy acted as a disregard cue, although youthfulness per se enhanced memorability. In Experiment 3, undergraduate-aged and middle-aged male and female targets had brief interactions with subjects. The hypothesis that college students were more likely to disregard middle-aged strangers with whom they had a brief encounter than strangers of their own age was supported. Experiment 4, following up a methodological point, supported the disregard hypothesis with the finding that the attractiveness of female targets affected the recall of male but not female subjects. In Experiment 5, middle-aged male and female targets had brief interactions with young and middle-aged subjects; the hypothesis that they would be better remembered by the middle-aged subjects was supported. It was concluded that although the faces of the targets and the memory of the subjects set boundary conditions, the invisibility of others is largely determined by the purposes of the observer as embodied in the disregard criteria.