The reliability of lie detection performance

Detecting the veracity of children's experiences through drawings

Research is lacking regarding adults' ability to determine whether children's drawings are based on an experience or not. Drawings are useful in professional settings to alleviate linguistic demands, facilitate memory, and have been used as evidence. Determining the accuracy of veracity assessments of children's drawings would inform professionals regarding their use as evidence of experiences. Twenty-eight children (14 younger, Mage = 7.53 years, SDage = 1.19; 14 older, Mage = 11.67 years, SD = 1.27) produced drawings of two events: one staged experienced, and one narrative-based not experienced event. Fifty (Study 1, Mage = 23.72 years, SDage = 9.70) and 63 (Study 2, Mage = 25.92, SDage = 12.79) adults indicated whether each drawing was based on experience and their confidence in each assessment. In Study 2, additional drawing quality assessments were collected. Results indicated that adults were more accurate at distinguishing experienced than not experienced drawings for older artists. An inverse relationship was observed between confidence and accuracy-participants were more confident when they were inaccurate, especially for younger artists. Drawing quality improved with age and for drawings of experienced events. Adults tended to rate drawings of higher quality as resulting from experience leading to the highest accuracy for drawings from older artists that were based on experience. Overall, results suggest that there may be some features of drawings that allow for above chance levels of accuracy (up to 75%). However, rates are not high enough across assessments (M = 53.93%, range: 39%-75%) to reliably use them as indicators of experience.

Machine learning for cognitive behavioral analysis: datasets, methods, paradigms, and research directions

Human behaviour reflects cognitive abilities. Human cognition is fundamentally linked to the different experiences or characteristics of consciousness/emotions, such as joy, grief, anger, etc., which assists in effective communication with others. Detection and differentiation between thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are paramount in learning to control our emotions and respond more effectively in stressful circumstances. The ability to perceive, analyse, process, interpret, remember, and retrieve information while making judgments to respond correctly is referred to as Cognitive Behavior. After making a significant mark in emotion analysis, deception detection is one of the key areas to connect human behaviour, mainly in the forensic domain. Detection of lies, deception, malicious intent, abnormal behaviour, emotions, stress, etc., have significant roles in advanced stages of behavioral science. Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning (AI/ML) has helped a great deal in pattern recognition, data extraction and analysis, and interpretations. The goal of using AI and ML in behavioral sciences is to infer human behaviour, mainly for mental health or forensic investigations. The presented work provides an extensive review of the research on cognitive behaviour analysis. A parametric study is presented based on different physical characteristics, emotional behaviours, data collection sensing mechanisms, unimodal and multimodal datasets, modelling AI/ML methods, challenges, and future research directions.

Physical Cue Influences Children's Empathy for Pain: The Role of Attention Allocation

Empathy for pain is evolutionally important and context-dependent. The current study explored the effect of physical cue on 4- to 5-year-old children’s empathy for pain with two experiments. Experiment 1 investigated the effect of valid and invalid physical cue as compared to baseline (without cue) in pain evaluation task (evaluating the pain intensity of a facial expression, N = 28). Experiment 2 employed eye-tracking to investigate the attentional process in valid and baseline conditions (evaluating the pain intensity of a body image with an apparently injured arm or leg, N = 65). We found the evaluation of pain intensity was the highest in the valid condition, and higher in baseline condition than invalid. As for eye-tracking results, children fixated more quickly, had more fixations and longer total fixation duration in valid-cue condition. Of attention allocation, compared with baseline condition, children fixated on arm/leg more quickly, more frequently and for longer time in valid condition. Additionally, eye-tracking results were significantly related to their evaluation of pain intensity.

Does parental coaching affect children's false reports? Comparing verbal markers of deception

The present study examined differences in children's true and false narratives as a function of parental coaching by comparing the verbal markers associated with deception. Children (N = 65, 4-7 years old) played the same game with an adult stranger over three consecutive days. Parents coached their children to falsely allege that they had played a second game and to generate details for the fabricated event. One week after the last play session, children were interviewed about their experiences. For children with the least amount of parental coaching, true and false reports could be distinguished by multiple verbal markers of deception (e.g., cognitive processes, temporal information, self-references). The fabricated reports of children who spent more time being coaching by a parent resembled their truthful reports. These findings have implications for real-world forensic contexts when children have been coached to make false allegations and fabricate information at the behest of a parent.

Adults' Detection of Deception in Children: Effect of Coaching and Age for Children's True and Fabricated Reports of Injuries

A total of 1,074 undergraduates judged the truthfulness of children's interviews (from verbatim transcripts) about experiencing injuries serious enough to require hospital emergency room treatment. Ninety-six children (three age groups: 5-7, 8-10, and 11-14 years, 50% girls) were interviewed. At each age, 16 children told truthful accounts of actual injury experiences and 16 fabricated their reports, with half of each group coached by parents for the previous 4 days. Lies by 5- to 7-year-olds, whether coached or not, were detected at above-chance levels. In contrast, 8- to 10-year-olds' accounts that were coached, whether true or not, were more likely to be believed. For 11- to 14-year-olds, adults were less likely to accurately judge lies if they were coached. The believability of children aged 8 or above who were coached to lie is particularly disturbing in light of the finding that participants were more confident in the accuracy of their veracity decisions when judging coached reports.

Motivational cues: the role of perceived senders' self-control ability in raters' deception judgements

Previous studies have found that senders' personal traits may be used by others to make judgements about the senders' truthfulness. Two studies were conducted to examine whether perceived self-control ability has an effect on deception judgement. Perceived self-control was hypothesized to act as a motivational cue that participants would use to assess the sender's motivation to lie, which in turn would influence their deception judgement. Results revealed that when participants assessed the sender as having higher self-control ability, they would consider the sender to be less motivated to lie in daily life (Study 1), and judge the sender more truthful in a text-based deception judgement task (Study 2). However, the effect of perceived self-control ability disappeared in a video-based task (Study 2), likely due to the multitude of various cues available in audio-visual stimuli. The theoretical and applied implications of the results are discussed.

Emotional intelligence and mismatching expressive and verbal messages: a contribution to detection of deception

Processing facial emotion, especially mismatches between facial and verbal messages, is believed to be important in the detection of deception. For example, emotional leakage may accompany lying. Individuals with superior emotion perception abilities may then be more adept in detecting deception by identifying mismatch between facial and verbal messages. Two personal factors that may predict such abilities are female gender and high emotional intelligence (EI). However, evidence on the role of gender and EI in detection of deception is mixed. A key issue is that the facial processing skills required to detect deception may not be the same as those required to identify facial emotion. To test this possibility, we developed a novel facial processing task, the FDT (Face Decoding Test) that requires detection of inconsistencies between facial and verbal cues to emotion. We hypothesized that gender and ability EI would be related to performance when cues were inconsistent. We also hypothesized that gender effects would be mediated by EI, because women tend to score as more emotionally intelligent on ability tests. Data were collected from 210 participants. Analyses of the FDT suggested that EI was correlated with superior face decoding in all conditions. We also confirmed the expected gender difference, the superiority of high EI individuals, and the mediation hypothesis. Also, EI was more strongly associated with facial decoding performance in women than in men, implying there may be gender differences in strategies for processing affective cues. It is concluded that integration of emotional and cognitive cues may be a core attribute of EI that contributes to the detection of deception.

The Effects of Repetition on Children's True and False Reports

As children are often called upon to provide testimony in court proceedings, determining the veracity of their statements is an important issue. In the course of investigation by police and social workers, children are often repeatedly interviewed about their experiences, though the impact of this repetition on children's true and false statements remains largely unexamined. The current study analysed semantic differences in children's truthful and fabricated statements about an event they had or had not participated in. Results revealed that children's truthful and fabricated reports differed in linguistic content, and that their language also varied with repetition. Discriminant analyses revealed that with repetition, children's true and false reports became increasingly difficult to differentiate using linguistic markers, though true reports were consistently classified correctly at higher rates than false reports. The implications of these findings for legal procedures concerning child witnesses are discussed.

Detecting children's lies: comparing true accounts about highly stressful injuries with unprepared, prepared, and coached lies

In this investigation, 514 university students judged whether children were telling the truth about highly emotional events. Eight children (half female, half 8-9 and the remainder 12-14 years old) had been injured seriously enough to require emergency room treatment and were interviewed a few days later. Each was yoked to three other children matched in age and gender who fabricated accounts under one of three conditions: lies that were unprepared, prepared (24 hours to prepare), and coached by parents. Participants were at chance when judging true accounts as well as unprepared and prepared lies. However, 74% of the coached lies were judged as true. Participants' confidence in their judgments, age, experience with children, and relevant coursework/training did not improve judgments.