Emerging Neurotechnologies for Lie-Detection: Promises and Perils

Behavioral Sciences & The Law, 2009

Tools for noninvasive stimulation of the brain, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), have provided new insights in the study of brain-behavior relationships due to their ability to directly alter cortical activity. In particular, TMS and tDCS have proven to be useful tools for establishing causal relationships between behavioral and brain imaging measures. As such, there has been interest in whether these tools may represent novel technologies for deception detection by altering a person's ability to engage brain networks involved in conscious deceit. Investigation of deceptive behavior using noninvasive brain stimulation is at an early stage. Here we review the existing literature on the application of noninvasive brain stimulation in the study of deception. Whether such approaches could be usefully applied to the detection of deception by altering a person's ability to engage brain networks involved in conscious deceit remains to be validated. Ethical and legal consequences of the development of such a technology are discussed.

The American Journal of Bioethics, 2010

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2016

This paper will explore how the use of neuroscientific technology to identify deception may impact on the human rights of the accused. The particular focus of the paper centres on accused persons in England and Wales. However, in order to understand the ramifications of using the technology, the paper explores the use of neuroscience in criminal proceedings from a number of international jurisdictions. To begin, the paper outlines the potential issues with the admissibility of such evidence at the trial stage. The paper transitions to a wide exploration of the use of brain based lie detection in an international context. The paper argues that if the stringent rules of admissibility could be satisfied, the use of such technology would fundamentally weaken core human rights; in particular, the right to legal advice under Article 6, interwoven with this is the presumption of innocence and privilege against self-incrimination. Furthermore, using the evidence may have the propensity to u...

Indian Journal of Medical Specialities, 2011

The classical methods of forensic science like finger printing, polygraphic lie detector test, narcoanalysis and DNA finger printing are being questioned for their reliability and accuracy. Newer developments in investigating crime are evolving like the use of event related evoked potentials to retrieve the sequence of events of crime as recorded in the brain of the criminal/accused. The principle of event related evoked potentials is simple. In an oddball paradigm two stimuli of varying characteristics are presented to the individual, one repeated frequently and the other being rare, is given randomly at infrequent intervals. The subject is asked to respond to the infrequent or target stimulus by pressing a button. The response to target stimulus is recorded as P3 wave of the cognitive evoked potentials. P3 wave of the ERPs has wide applications in cognitive forensic science and interrogative polygraphy in particular. Late vertex positivity in ERP reflects guilt detection in a test known as guilty knowledge. Memory and encoding related multifaceted electroencephalographic responses (MERMER) have been used to determine whether the subject had relevant information (committing of crime) in his brain, after presenting him with probing (relevant), target and non-target stimuli. Two high amplitude P3 waves are recorded in response to target and probing stimuli in case of a knowledgeable person and only one P3 in case of an innocent person. The newly emerging, late responses to ERP is a step forward to quantify the thought processing feature of the brain. Brain wave science has emerged as a new discipline with promising application in field of crime investigation.

There has been much hype about the implications of contemporary developments in neuroscience for the law. Pardo and Patterson are skeptical of this hype. They argue that a good deal of the hype stems from simple philosophical errors and conceptual confusions. In the course of this critique, they offer particular objections to the forensic use of brain-based lie detection methods. Although agreeing with the authors about the need for skepticism and conceptual clarity, this chapter argues that they get things wrong when it comes to their skepticism of brain-based lie detection. This is for three reasons. First, in their critique they focus too heavily on the problems associated with the more speculative and less empirically grounded fMRI-based methods, not enough on the more robustly grounded EEG-based methods. Second, when focus is switched to these methods, their main philosophical critique of the use of neuroscience in law – the neurolaw mereological fallacy – has much less bite. And third, they neglect to address the merits of brain-based lie detection methods relative to existing methods for inferring what a witness does or does not believe. When these three critiques are factored in, the future looks brighter for this particular use of neuroscience in law.

Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1994

2017 Joint 17th World Congress of International Fuzzy Systems Association and 9th International Conference on Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems (IFSA-SCIS), 2017

Deception detection is important for legal, moral and clinical purposes but still it is harder even for security officers and judges. Therefore an effective,light weight approach is a must.There are several technologies used in deception detection. EEG based deception detection is one such approach. P300 wave is most commonly used in EEG based deception detection which depends on a stimuli. The study provides an alternative approach to deception detection instead of using P300.Twelve subjects were participated to the study and EEG signals were recorded while they were telling truths and lies. The preprocessed EEG data then fed in to feature extraction and machine learning algorithm alone with Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) paradigm to create a model. Logistic regression classifier was used as the machine learning algorithm to classify the eeg signal. The test data were used on the trained model with cross validation. There were significant difference between truth telling and lying s...

European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 2009

International Journal of Evidence and Proof 19 (1): 52-66, 2015

The lie detector test has long been treated with suspicion by the law. Recently, several authors have called this suspicion into question. They argue that the lie detector test may have considerable forensic benefits, particularly if we move past the classic, false-positive prone, autonomic nervous system-based (ANS-based) control question test, to the more reliable, brain-based, concealed information test. These authors typically rely on a “comparative advantage” argument to make their case. According to this argument, we should not be so suspicious of lie detection evidence if it has comparative advantages over the epistemic methods currently utilised by the legal system. In this article, I add to this growing support by making a novel comparative advantage argument in favour of brain-based lie detection evidence. The argument focuses on the P300 concealed information test (P300 CIT), which has several unique properties, and on the effect it may have on pre-trial bargaining in criminal cases rather than in-court evidence. The thesis is that P300 CIT could allow for innocent defendants to credibly signal their innocence to investigators and prosecutors during pre-trial bargaining more effectively than current proposed methods for doing the same thing. I defend this argument from a number of objections, and suggest that it opens up an interesting avenue in the ongoing debate about the merits of this technology. Although the argument is presented with the criminal law in mind, it could form part of a more general cumulative case in favour of this technology.

Trends in cognitive sciences, 2008

With the increasing interest in the neuroimaging of deception and its commercial application, there is a need to pay more attention to methodology. The weakness of studying deception in an experimental setting has been discussed intensively for over half a century. However, even though much effort has been put into their development, paradigms are still inadequate. The problems that bedevilled the old technology have not been eliminated by the new. Advances will only be possible if experiments are designed that take account of the intentions of the subject and the context in which these occur.