Deception detection with behavioral, autonomic, and neural measures: Conceptual and methodological considerations that warrant modesty

Abstract

The detection of deception has attracted increased attention among psychological researchers, legal scholars, and ethicists during the last decade. Much of this has been driven by the possibility of using neuroimaging techniques for lie detection. Yet, neuroimaging studies addressing deception detection are clouded by lack of conceptual clarity and a host of methodological problems that are not unique to neuroimaging. We review the various research paradigms and the dependent measures that have been adopted to study deception and its detection. In doing so, we differentiate between basic research designed to shed light on the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying deceptive behavior and applied research aimed at detecting lies. We also stress the distinction between paradigms attempting to detect deception directly and those attempting to establish involvement by detecting crime-related knowledge, and discuss the methodological difficulties and threats to validity associated with each paradigm. Our conclusion is that the main challenge of future research is to find paradigms that can isolate cognitive factors associated with deception, rather than the discovery of a unique (brain) correlate of lying. We argue that the Comparison Question Test currently applied in many countries has weak scientific validity, which cannot be remedied by using neuroimaging measures. Other paradigms are promising, but the absence of data from ecologically valid studies poses a challenge for legal admissibility of their outcomes.

Strategic Interviewing to Detect Deception: Cues to Deception across Repeated Interviews

“…The present procedure may not work if the interview contains questions about peripheral details that innocent suspects failed to notice or encode. More specifically, if truth tellers did not encode peripheral details, one cannot expect them to give accurate, consistent, and non-evasive answers when asked about these details (see the polygraph literature for a similar concern regarding the Concealed Information Test ; e.g., Meijer et al, 2016). If practitioners are to use this procedure in the future, they should select for the interview only those pieces of information most likely to have been noticed.…”

Lying takes time: A meta-analysis on reaction time measures of deception.

“…A comparison of sensitivity and specificity for the RT CIT and the CIT using skin conductance, event-related potentials, and fMRI is available in a recent review of Meijer et al (2016). In this review, the area (a) under the receiver operating curve (ROC) was used as CIT, estimates were based on a relatively small number of participants.…”

“…Pinocchio's nose), and therefore evaluating whether a response is truthful or not always requires its comparison to an appropriate "baseline" (Meijer et al, 2016). What constitutes an adequate baseline is, however, heavily debated.…”

“…Importantly, although some lie tests show a predictive validity above chance level, empirical evidence has shown that they perform considerably below perfection (see e.g., Meijer, Verschuere, Gamer, Merckelbach, & Ben-Shakhar, 2016;National Research Council, 2003). Voice stress analysis as employed in the Zimmermann case even does not seem to perform above chance level in discerning lies from truth (Eriksson & Lacarda, 2007).…”

The language of lies: a preregistered direct replication of Suchotzki and Gamer (2018; Experiment 2)

“…To conclude, for both native German speakers as well as native Dutch speakers, the validity of RTbased deceptions paradigmsused mostly for the study of deception but having applied potential for lie detection (Meijer, Verschuere, Gamer, Merckelbach, & Ben-Shakhar, 2016)is hampered by using a nonnative test language. This is worrysome, because in an ever more global world, lie tests are more often conducted in a foreign language (often English), and the findings indicate that lie-truth discrimination may be less accurate for statements in a foreign language than for statements in the speakeŕs native language.…”