Improving the success of missing person appeals using eye tracking technology

Applications are invited for a fully-funded three year PhD to commence in October 2025.

The PhD will be based in the Faculty of Science and Health within the School of Psychology, Sport and Health Sciences, and will be supervised by Dr Stefana Juncu and Professor Lorraine Hope. 

Candidates applying for this project may be eligible to compete for one of a small number of bursaries available. Successful applicants will receive a bursary to cover tuition fees at the UK/EU rate for three years and a stipend in line with the UKRI rate (£19,237 for 2025/26). Bursary recipients will also receive a contribution of £1,500 per year towards consumables, conference, project or training costs..

Costs for student visa and immigration health surcharge are not covered by this bursary. For further guidance and advice visit our international and EU students ‘Visa FAQs’ page.

In the UK alone, someone is recorded missing every two minutes, adding up to over 300,000 incidents a year; two-thirds of which involving people under 18 years of age (National Crime Agency, 2023). When a person goes missing, the police or other non-governmental organizations usually distribute appeals asking the public to be on the lookout for that individual and to report any sighting to the authorities. Given the documented large numbers of missing and wanted people, it is critically important that we maximise the likelihood that these alerts will be effective. To do this, it is important to understand the type of information that people engage with when presented with missing persons appeals (i.e., during encoding), as well as the type of information people engage with while looking for missing persons in different contexts (i.e., during testing). We will use the innovative method of looking at participants’ eye gaze behaviour to advance understanding of how public members engage with different missing persons appeals.

Eye-tracking technology will be used to measure the visual attention and engagement patterns of participants as they view different types of missing persons appeals. This will allow us to understand how people allocate their visual attention when exposed with such appeals and to identify which elements (e.g., face images, name, height, other written information) are most effective sustaining engagement. This data will also allow us to observe whether participants who focus on specific elements (e.g., they look at the image longer) will perform better during the prospective person memory task.

How to apply

If you have any project-specific questions please contact Dr Stefana Juncu (Stefana.juncu@port.ac.uk), quoting the project code.

When you are ready to apply, please use the online application form of the respective project on our PhD scholarships page. Please note that email applications are not accepted.

 Make sure you submit a personal statement, proof of your degrees and grades, details of two referees, proof of your English language proficiency and an up-to-date CV.  Our ‘How to Apply’ page offers further guidance on the PhD application process.

If you want to be considered for this funded PhD opportunity you must quote project code PSH50090125 when applying.