{"id":29922,"date":"2019-09-10T09:12:29","date_gmt":"2019-09-10T13:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/?p=29922"},"modified":"2019-09-09T04:51:51","modified_gmt":"2019-09-09T08:51:51","slug":"researchers-develop-test-to-ensnare-those-lying-about-a-persons-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2019\/09\/researchers-develop-test-to-ensnare-those-lying-about-a-persons-identity\/","title":{"rendered":"Researchers develop test to ensnare those lying about a person&#8217;s identity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From the University of Stirling press release:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A new test developed by the University of Stirling could help police to determine <strong>when criminals or witnesses are lying about their knowledge of a person&#8217;s identity<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>A team led by Dr Ailsa Millen, Research Fellow in Psychology at Stirling, conducted a study to establish whether liars could hide their reaction when shown a photograph of a familiar face &#8212; and found that they could not.<\/p>\n<p>Dr Millen said: &#8220;Police officers routinely use photographs of faces to establish key identities in crimes. Some witnesses are honest &#8212; but many are hostile and intentionally conceal knowledge of known identities. For example, criminal networks &#8212; such as terrorist groups &#8212; might deny knowledge to protect one another, or a victim might be too afraid to identify their attacker.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Our study tracked people&#8217;s eye movements when they denied knowledge of someone they knew. Instead of looking for signs of lying directly, we looked for <strong>markers of recognition in patterns of eye fixations<\/strong> &#8212; such as how individuals looked at a photograph of someone they recognised; compared to someone they did not.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The main aim was to determine if liars could conceal recognition by following instructions to look at every familiar and unfamiliar face with the same sequence of eye fixations &#8212; in short, <strong>they could not<\/strong>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>They used a process known as the concealed information test (CIT), in which participants&#8217; eye movements are tracked while viewing photographs of familiar and unfamiliar faces on a computer screen. In each test, participants denied knowledge of one familiar identity while correctly rejecting genuinely unfamiliar faces, by pressing a button and saying &#8216;no&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>The team found that <strong>most liars could not fully conceal markers of face recognition<\/strong> &#8212; either spontaneously, or during explicit strategies to look at every face with the same sequence of eye movements. Moreover, these <strong>explicit attempts uncovered more instances of concealment than spontaneous attempts to hide knowledge<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Dr Millen explained: &#8220;The harder that individuals tried to conceal knowledge, the more markers of recognition there were. These results suggest that <strong>it is difficult to conceal multiple markers of recognition<\/strong> at the same time.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The CIT is used in field practice in Japan to uncover guilty knowledge about a crime, which only the culprit would know, such as a murder weapon. However, little research has examined the process being used with faces.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the University of Stirling press release: A new test developed by the University of Stirling could help police to determine when criminals or witnesses are lying about their knowledge&#8230; <a class=\"read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2019\/09\/researchers-develop-test-to-ensnare-those-lying-about-a-persons-identity\/\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":28361,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[526],"tags":[20,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29922"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29922"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30054,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29922\/revisions\/30054"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}