Basic and applied research on deception and its detection

Abstract

Deception is a ubiquitous phenomenon in social interactions and has attracted a significant amount of research during the last decades. The majority of studies in this field focused on how deception modulates behavioral, autonomic, and brain responses and whether these changes can be used to validly identify lies. Especially the latter question, which historically gave rise to the development of psychophysiological "lie detection" techniques, has been driving research on deception and its detection until today. The detection of deception and concealed information in forensic examinations currently constitutes one of the most frequent applications of psychophysiological methods in the field. With the increasing use of such methods, the techniques for detecting deception have been controversially discussed in the scientific community. It has been proposed to shift from the original idea of detecting deception per se to a more indirect approach that allows for determining whether a suspect has specific knowledge of crime-related details. This so-called Concealed Information Test is strongly linked to basic psychological concepts concerning memory, attention, orienting, and response monitoring. Although research in this field has intensified with the advancement of neuroimaging techniques such as PET and fMRI in the last decade, basic questions on the psychological mechanisms underlying modulatory effects of deception and information concealment on behavioral, autonomic, and brain responses are still poorly understood. This Research Topic brings together contributions from researchers in experimental psychology, psychophysiology, and neuroscience focusing on the understanding of the broad concept of deception including the detection of concealed information, with respect to basic research questions as well as applied issues. This Research Topic is mainly composed of originalresearch articles but reviews and papers elaborating on novel methodological approaches have also been included. Experimental methods include, but are not limited to, behavioral, autonomic, electroencephalographic or brain imaging techniques that allow for revealing relevant facets of deception on a multimodal level. While this Research Topic primarily includes laboratory work, relevant issues for the field use of such methods are also discussed.