P111 Neurobiology of deception and moral cognition

Cerebral Cortex

Much research finds that lying takes longer than truth-telling. Yet, the source of this response time difference remains elusive. Here, we assessed the spatiotemporal evolution of electrical brain activity during honesty and dishonesty in 150 participants using a sophisticated electrical neuroimaging approach—the microstate approach. This uniquely positioned us to identify and contrast the entire chain of mental processes involved during honesty and dishonesty. Specifically, we find that the response time difference is the result of an additional late-occurring mental process, unique to dishonest decisions, interrupting the antecedent mental processing. We suggest that this process inhibits the activation of the truth, thus permitting the execution of the lie. These results advance our understanding of dishonesty and clarify existing theories about the role of increased cognitive load. More broadly, we demonstrate the vast potential of our approach to illuminate the temporal organiz...

The authors attempted to replicate prior group brain correlates of deception (F. Kozel et al., in press) and improve on the consistency of individual results. Healthy, right-handed adults were instructed to tell the truth or to lie while being imaged in a 3T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. Blood oxygen level-dependent functional MRI significance maps were generated for subjects giving a deceptive answer minus a truthful answer (lie minus true) and the reverse (true minus lie). The lie minus true group analysis (n ϭ 10) revealed significant activation in 5 regions, consistent with a previous study (right orbitofrontal, inferior frontal, middle frontal cortex, cingulate gyrus, and left middle frontal), with no significant activation for true minus lie. Individual results of the lie minus true condition were variable. Results show that functional MRI is a reasonable tool with which to study deception.

PLOS ONE, 2015

Deception is an impactful social event that has been the focus of an abundance of researches over recent decades. In this paper, an electroencephalography (EEG) study is presented regarding the cognitive processes of an instructed liar/truth-teller during the time window of stimulus (question) delivery period (SDP) prior to their deceptive/truthful responses towards questions related to authentic (WE: with prior experience) and fictional experience (NE: no prior experience). To investigate deception in non-experienced events, the subjects were given stimuli in a mock interview scenario that induced them to fabricate lies. To analyze the data, frequency domain network and connectivity analysis was performed in the source space in order to provide a more systematic level understanding of deception during SDP. This study reveals several groups of neuronal generators underlying both the instructed lying (IL) and the instructed truth-telling (IT) conditions for both tasks during the SDP. Despite the similarities existed in these group components, significant differences were found in the intra-and inter-group connectivity between the IL and IT conditions in either task. Additionally, the response time was found to be positively correlated with the clustering coefficient of the inferior frontal gyrus (44R) in the WE-IL condition and positively correlated with the clustering coefficient of the precuneus (7L) and the angular gyrus (39R) in the WE-IT condition. However, the response time was found to be marginally negatively correlated with the clustering coefficient of the secondary auditory cortex (42L) in the NE-IL condition and negatively correlated with the clustering coefficient of the somatosensory association cortex (5L, R) in the NE-IT condition. Therefore, these results provide complementary and intuitive evidence for the differences between the IL and IT conditions in SDP for two types of deception tasks, thus elucidating the electrophysiological mechanisms underlying SDP of deception from regional, interregional , network, and inter-network scale analyses.

Soc …, 2008

The capacity to deceive others is a complex mental skill that requires the ability to suppress truthful information. The polygraph is widely used in countries such as the USA to detect deception. However, little is known about the effects of emotional processes (such as the fear of being found guilty despite being innocent) on the physiological responses that are used to detect lies. The aim of this study was to investigate the time course and neural correlates of untruthful behavior by analyzing electrocortical indexes in response to visually presented neutral and affective questions. Affective questions included sexual, shameful or disgusting topics. A total of 296 questions that were inherently true or false were presented to 25 subjects while ERPs were recorded from 128 scalp sites. Subjects were asked to lie on half of the questions and to answer truthfully on the remaining half. Behavioral and ERP responses indicated an increased need for executive control functions, namely working memory, inhibition and task switching processes, during deceptive responses. Deceptive responses also elicited a more negative N400 over the prefrontal areas and a smaller late positivity (LP 550-750 ms) over the prefrontal and frontal areas. However, a reduction in LP amplitude was also elicited by truthful affective responses. The failure to observe a difference in LP responses across conditions likely results from emotional interference. A swLORETA inverse solution was computed on the N400 amplitude (300-400 ms) for the dishonest -honest contrast. These results showed the activation of the superior, medial, middle and inferior frontal gyri (BA9, 11, 47) and the anterior cingulate cortex during deceptive responses. Our results conclude that the N400 amplitude is a reliable neural marker of deception.

Behavioral Neuroscience, 2004

The authors attempted to replicate prior group brain correlates of deception (F. Kozel et al., in press) and improve on the consistency of individual results. Healthy, right-handed adults were instructed to tell the truth or to lie while being imaged in a 3T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. Blood oxygen level-dependent functional MRI significance maps were generated for subjects giving a deceptive answer minus a truthful answer (lie minus true) and the reverse (true minus lie). The lie minus true group analysis (n ϭ 10) revealed significant activation in 5 regions, consistent with a previous study (right orbitofrontal, inferior frontal, middle frontal cortex, cingulate gyrus, and left middle frontal), with no significant activation for true minus lie. Individual results of the lie minus true condition were variable. Results show that functional MRI is a reasonable tool with which to study deception.

2008

Lies are intentional distortions of event knowledge. No experimen- tal data are available on manipulating lying processes. To address this issue, we stimulated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Fifteen healthy volunteers were tested before and after tDCS (anodal, cathodal, and sham). Two types of truthful (truthful selected: TS; truthful unselected: TU) and deceptive (lie

Proceedings of the National …, 2009

In one study (40), subjects were instructed by a second experimenter to deceive the first experimenter. This deception, though described as ''dishonest,'' involves neither temptation nor, in our estimation, morally questionable behavior.

Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 2017

Lying is one of the characteristic features of psychopathy, and has been recognized in clinical and diagnostic descriptions of the disorder, yet individuals with psychopathic traits have been found to have reduced neural activity in many of the brain regions that are important for lying. In this study, we examine brain activity in sixteen individuals with varying degrees of psychopathic traits during a task in which they are instructed to falsify information or tell the truth about autobiographical and non-autobiographical facts, some of which was related to criminal behavior. We found that psychopathic traits were primarily associated with increased activity in the anterior cingulate, various regions of the prefrontal cortex, insula, angular gyrus, and the inferior parietal lobe when participants falsified information of any type. Associations tended to be stronger when participants falsified information about criminal behaviors. Although this study was conducted in a small sample of individuals and the task used has limited ecological validity, these findings support a growing body of literature suggesting that in some contexts, individuals with higher levels of psychopathic traits may demonstrate heightened levels of brain activity.

International Journal of Psychophysiology, 1992

The demonstration of deception as a psychological process requires a comparison of physiological responding to questions answered honestly or deceptively, under conditions which differ only with respect to deception. Such electrodermal (skin conductance response (SCR) differentiation was recently reported in the Differentiation-of-Deception Paradigm. The present study had two empirical goals: (a) to assess the possible confounding role of retrieval-difficulty and novelty in producing the differentiation effect; (b) to ascertain any influencing effects of a memorial ('cumulative' mental load) and two motivational (Monetary-Incentive and Ego-Involvement) factors on the eleetrodermal differentiation phenomenon and on overall responding. In addition to the basic Deceptive vs. Honest manipulation of the Differentiation-of-Deception Paradigm, the present study varied, within 60 subjects, Question Type (easily retrieved Autobiographical vs. more difficult-to-retrieve Biographical). The two two-level motivational factors were varied between subjects. Finally, to assess the confounding issue, voice latency (VL), known to be sensitive to retrieval-difficulty, was measured in addition to SCR. SCRs to deceptive answers exceeded those to the honestlyanswered questions, demonstrating the differentiation phenomenon. Results showed that although VL and SCR was significantly greater to Biographical than to Autobiographical questions, the differentiation effect emerged only in the SCR and not in VL, which suggests that memorial difficulty does not confound the electrodermai differentiation effect.