Building Next-Gen Lie Detectors
source: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=building-a-portrait-of-a-lie
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A young man steals across the hallway, slips through a door and scans the room. He opens a drawer, snatches a wristwatch inside and puts it in his pocket. Then he hurries out the door.
Sixty more people perform the same drill, half of them filching a watch and the others, a ring. Psychiatrist F. Andrew Kozel, now at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, and his colleagues promised to give a bonus payment to anyone who could conceal the deed from the scientists, who planned to look into their brains for signs of a cover-up.
Kozel and his co-workers scanned the volunteers’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which provides a measure of neural activity in different brain areas. During the scans, the subjects answered questions about the theft such as “Did you steal a watch?” or “Did you steal a ring?” The researchers also asked neutral yes/no queries as well as questions about minor wrongful acts. Each participant could truthfully deny stealing one of the objects but had to lie about the other to conceal the deed. (The volunteers were supposed to answer the unrelated questions truthfully.)
Kozel and his team initially identified typical neural activity patterns for true and false statements. Then, in the first use of fMRI to detect deception in individuals, the researchers used the patterns they identified to correctly determine whether each of the subjects had taken a watch or a ring 90 percent of the time.
The use of fMRI represents the cutting edge of lie-detection technology. As far as we know, no region of the brain specializes in lies. But investigators have found that lying activates brain regions involved in suppressing information and in resolving conflicts—such as that between the impulse to describe reality and the wish to contradict it. The use of fMRI combined with a clever questioning strategy could lead to a better method for detecting lies or, more precisely, for getting at the truth despite a person’s attempts to hide it.
Sixty more people perform the same drill, half of them filching a watch and the others, a ring. Psychiatrist F. Andrew Kozel, now at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, and his colleagues promised to give a bonus payment to anyone who could conceal the deed from the scientists, who planned to look into their brains for signs of a cover-up.
Kozel and his co-workers scanned the volunteers’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which provides a measure of neural activity in different brain areas. During the scans, the subjects answered questions about the theft such as “Did you steal a watch?” or “Did you steal a ring?” The researchers also asked neutral yes/no queries as well as questions about minor wrongful acts. Each participant could truthfully deny stealing one of the objects but had to lie about the other to conceal the deed. (The volunteers were supposed to answer the unrelated questions truthfully.)
Kozel and his team initially identified typical neural activity patterns for true and false statements. Then, in the first use of fMRI to detect deception in individuals, the researchers used the patterns they identified to correctly determine whether each of the subjects had taken a watch or a ring 90 percent of the time.
The use of fMRI represents the cutting edge of lie-detection technology. As far as we know, no region of the brain specializes in lies. But investigators have found that lying activates brain regions involved in suppressing information and in resolving conflicts—such as that between the impulse to describe reality and the wish to contradict it. The use of fMRI combined with a clever questioning strategy could lead to a better method for detecting lies or, more precisely, for getting at the truth despite a person’s attempts to hide it.
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