The cognitive load of narrative lies

Lying is assumed to increase cognitive load, and it has been shown to slow response times to simple questions. We employed a dual‐task methodology, the detection response task (DRT), to assess cognitive load in telling narrative lies in a live, open‐question interview. The DRT requires participants to press a button in response to a tactile stimulus every 3–5 s while performing a primary task, in this case, recounting either truthful or deceitful narratives. We found weak support for slowing in the time to initiate a narrative response when lying. In contrast, we found strong support for an increase in cognitive load when producing a narrative lie, as measured by both slowed DRT responses and increased response omissions, although this effect decreased with time on task. We advocate dual‐task methodologies such as the DRT for increasing understanding of the assumptions made by theories of deception and for refining lie detection techniques.     

Baselining affects the production of deceptive narratives

Recent research shows that the quality of a baseline (i.e., the analysis of one's behavior in normal conditions) decreases when the second narrative is expected and deceitful. However, a first step would be to investigate whether the writing of a first narrative might influence the second, independently of its expectancy. In this study, we hypothesized that second narratives would be less detailed, especially if these narratives are deceptive. Participants (N = 71) were asked to narrate two consecutive truthful and deceptive narratives. The second narrative was unexpected, and the order of the narratives was counterbalanced. Results suggest a detrimental effect of deceptiveness and order on the frequency of details. Moreover, an interaction was observed, suggesting when narratives are written after a first one, the frequency of details decreases, all the more if they were deceptive. The results of this experiment are discussed from both a theoretical and an applied perspective.     

Electrophysiological markers of working memory usage as an index for truth-based lies

People prefer to lie using altered truthful events from memory, perhaps because doing so can increase their credibility while reducing cognitive and working memory (WM) load. One possible way to counter such deceptive behavior is to track WM usage, since fabricating coherent lies or managing between truth and lies is likely to involve heavy WM load. In this study, participants memorized a list of words in the study session and used these old words to provide deceptive answers when cued later, in the testing session. Our behavioral results showed that people needed more time to make a deceptive response during the execution stage, and this prolonged deceptive reaction time (RT) was negatively correlated with each participant’s WM capacity. Event-related potential findings showed a more negative-going frontal amplitude between the lie and truth conditions during the preparation stage, suggesting that WM preparatory processes can be detected long before a deceptive response is verbalized. Furthermore, we observed a larger positive frontal-central amplitude during the execution stage, which was negatively correlated with participants’ lie–truth RT differences, suggesting that participants’ efficiency in producing deceptive responses can be readily traced electrophysiologically. Together, these findings suggest that WM capacity and preparation are crucial to efficient lying and that their related electrophysiological signatures can potentially be used to uncover deceptive behaviors.     

Reaction time of motor responses in two-stimulus paradigms involving deception and congruity with varying levels of difficulty

Deception research has focused on identifying peripheral nervous system markers while ignoring cognitive mechanisms underlying those markers. Cognitive theorists argue that the process of deception may involve such constructs as attentional capture, working memory load, or perceived incongruity with memory, while psychophysiologists argue for stimulus salience, arousal, and emotion. Three studies were conducted to assess reaction time (RT) in relation to deception, response congruity, and preparedness to deceive. Similar to a semantic verification task, participants evaluated sentences that were either true or false, and then made truthful or deceptive evaluations of the sentence's base truth-value. Findings indicate that deceptive responses have a longer RT than truthful responses, and that this relationship remains constant across response type and preparedness to deceive. The authors use these findings in preliminary support of a comprehensive cognitive model of deception.     

Linguistic correlates of self in deceptive oral autobiographical narratives

The current study collected orally-delivered autobiographical narratives from a sample of 44 undergraduate students. Participants were asked to produce both deceptive and non-deceptive versions of their narrative to two specific autobiographical question prompts while standing in front of a video camera. Narratives were then analyzed with Coh-Metrix software on 33 indices of linguistic cohesion. Following a Bonferroni correction for the large number of linguistic variables (p < .002), results indicated that the deceptive narratives contained more explicit action verbs, less linguistic complexity, and less referential coherence (sentences being cohesive with each other). The results support a theory that, in deceptive narratives, there is greater narrative distance between the self that narrates and the self that is narrated about. This suggests that narrative selves are constituted not as autonomous selves, but are subject to processes (e.g., psychological, linguistic, social) that are likely operating on a subconscious level.     

Effects of task-irrelevant emotional information on deception

Deception has been reported to be influenced by task-relevant emotional information from an external stimulus. However, it remains unclear how task-irrelevant emotional information would influence deception. In the present study, facial expressions of different valence and emotion intensity were presented to participants, where they were asked to make either truthful or deceptive gender judgments according to the preceding cues. We observed the influence of facial expression intensity upon individuals’ cognitive cost of deceiving (mean difference of individuals’ truthful and deceptive response times). Larger cost was observed for high intensity faces compared to low intensity faces. These results provided insights on how automatic attraction of attention evoked by task-irrelevant emotional information in facial expressions influenced individuals’ cognitive cost of deceiving.     

Need for Cognition and the process of lie detection

Four experiments investigated the influence of Need for Cognition on the process of lie detection. According to the basic assumptions of dual process models, only higher Need for Cognition leads to the use of verbal information when making judgments of veracity. People with lower Need for Cognition predominantly use stereotypical nonverbal information for their judgments. In both Experiments 1 and 2, participants saw a film in which nonverbal cues (fidgety vs. calm movements) and verbal cues (low vs. high plausibility) were manipulated. As predicted, when Need for Cognition was lower, only the nonverbal cues influenced participants' judgments of veracity. In contrast, participants with higher Need for Cognition also used the verbal cues. Experiments 3 and 4 tested the hypothesis that higher Need for Cognition leads to better discrimination of truthful from deceptive messages. Both experiments found that participants with higher Need for Cognition achieved higher accuracy at classifying truthful and deceptive messages than participants with lower Need for Cognition.     

Practice effects, workload, and reaction time in deception

Cognitive theorists argue that deception may involve attentional capture, working memory load, or perceived incongruity with memory, whereas psychophysiologists argue for stimulus salience, arousal, and emotion. This article presents a comprehensive model of deception and assesses the effect of practice on deceptive responding. A three-session longitudinal study examined the effect of practice on reaction time (RT) in relation to deception and response congruity. Participants evaluated self-referent sentences and responded truthfully or deceptively. Findings indicate that deceptive responding generates longer RTs than does truthful responding and that this relationship remains constant with practice. We use these findings to support a cognitive model of deception.     

How distraction affects pedestrian response: Evidence from behavior patterns and cortex oxyhemoglobin changes

ObjectivesDistracted walking is a major cause of pedestrian road traffic injuries, but little is known about how distraction affects pedestrian safety. The study was designed to explore how visual and auditory distraction might influence pedestrian safety.MethodsThree experiments were conducted to explore causal mechanisms from two theoretical perspectives, increased cognitive load from the distraction task and resource competition in the same sensory modality. Pedestrians’ behavior patterns and cortex oxyhemoglobin changes were recorded while they performed a series of dual tasks.ResultsFour primary results emerged: (a) participants responded more slowly to both visual and auditory stimuli in traffic, as well as walked more slowly, while talking on the phone or text messaging compared to when undistracted or listening to music; (b) when participants completed pedestrian response tasks while distracted with a high cognitive load, their response was significantly slower and poorer than when they carried out a lower cognitive load distraction task, (c) participants had higher levels of oxy-Hb change in cortices related to visual processing and executive function while distracted with a higher cognitive load; and (d) participants' responses to traffic lights were slower and resulted in a higher activation in prefrontal cortex and occipital areas when distracted by a visual distraction task compared to when distracted with an auditory task; similarly, brain activation increased significantly in temporal areas when participants responded to an auditory car horn task compared to when they responded to visual traffic lights.ConclusionsBoth distracting cognitive load demands and the type of distraction task significantly affect young adult pedestrian performance and threaten pedestrian safety. Pedestrian injury prevention efforts should consider the effects of the type of distracting task and its cognitive demands on pedestrian safety.     

Police officers' credibility judgments: Accuracy and estimated ability

A study was conducted to examine Spanish police officers' and nonofficers' lie‐ and truth‐detection accuracy, as well as their estimated detection ability. The participants were 121 police officers and 146 undergraduates who watched videotaped truthful and deceptive statements. They had to indicate: (1) whether each statement was truthful or deceptive, and (2) how good police officers were, in comparison with the general population, at detecting the truthfulness or deceptiveness of a statement. Results indicate that police officers' accuracy was not higher than that of nonofficers, rather, while the officers reached an accuracy rate close to chance probability, the undergraduates surpassed that probability. Officers had a very strong tendency to judge the statements as deceptive; this made them less accurate than the students in judging the truthful accounts, while both groups reached a similar accuracy when judging the deceptive ones. Both occupational samples considered that the police are more capable of identifying truths and lies than the general population. However, this belief was stronger among the officers themselves than among the nonofficers. No significant correlation between estimated ability and accuracy was found for either sample. The results are explained in terms of the participants' wrong beliefs about the cues to deceit and the socialization process that police officers undergo, which would increase their confidence and perceived ability while hindering their learning of the actual indicators of deceit. The need for officers to receive training is emphasized, and some directions are given on how this training should be carried out.     

材料呈现方式和复习与否对中文电子笔记学习学习效果的影响

笔记策略的“转换假说”指出：将听觉材料写下来比将视觉材料写下来的学习效果更好。本研究以此为基础,以104名大学生为被试,采用多元方差分析的方法,探讨了材料呈现方式和复习与否对拼音键入的中文电子笔记的即时和延时学习效果的影响。结果发现,电子笔记在视觉材料上比在听觉材料上的即时学习效果更优;在间隔一周后的延时重测中,复习后的延时学习效果显著优于不复习,但复习在视觉材料组和听觉材料组中的促进作用无显著差异。     

Remembrance of lies past: A comparison of the features and consistency of truthful and fabricated trauma narratives

The credibility of reports of victimization must be evaluated by police and adjudicators. The present prospective study investigated the features of truthful and fabricated narratives of trauma and their relative consistency over a 6‐month period. Participants described both a genuine and fabricated traumatic experience on three occasions over the 6 months. The narrative features were coded at each phase and the stories' consistency was examined at Times 2 and 3. We found that truthful trauma narratives contained more: details, contextual information, and emotional details, and were rated as more ‘plausible’, relative to fabricated traumas. The details of truthful narratives also were more factually consistent than fabricated narratives over the 6 month interval. This research offers basic information on the nature and consistency of traumatic memories, and potentially applicable information for discriminating true and false allegations. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A truth that’s told with bad intent: An ERP study of deception

Human social cognition critically relies on the ability to deceive others. However, the cognitive and neural underpinnings of deception are still poorly understood. Why does lying place increased demands on cognitive control? The present study investigated whether cognitive control processes during deception are recruited due to the need to inhibit a tendency to state the truth, or reflect deceptive intent more generally. We engaged participants in a face-to-face interaction game and examined event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while participants lied and told the truth with or without deceptive intention. The same medial frontal negative deflection (N450) occurred when participants lied and when they told the truth with deceptive intent. This suggests that the main challenge of lying is not to inhibit a tendency to state the truth. Rather, the challenge is to handle the cognitive conflict resulting from the need to keep others’ mental states in mind while deceiving them.     

How Children with Head Injury Represent Real and Deceptive Emotion in Short Narratives

Narratives are not only about events, but also about the emotions those events elicit. Understanding a narrative involves not just the affective valence of implied emotional states, but the formation of an explicit mental representation of those states. In turn, this representation provides a mechanism that particularizes emotion and modulates its display, which then allows emotional expression to be modified according to particular contexts. This includes understanding that a character may feel an emotion but inhibit its display or even express a deceptive emotion. We studied how 59 school-aged children with head injury and 87 normally-developing age-matched controls understand real and deceptive emotions in brief narratives. Children with head injury showed less sensitivity than controls to how emotions are expressed in narratives. While they understood the real emotions in the text, and could recall what provoked the emotion and the reason for concealing it, they were less able than controls to identify deceptive emotions. Within the head injury group, factors such as an earlier age at head injury and frontal lobe contusions were associated with poor understanding of deceptive emotions. The results are discussed in terms of the distinction between emotions as felt and emotions as a cognitive framework for understanding other people's actions and mental states. We conclude that children with head injury understand emotional communication, the spontaneous externalization of real affect, but not emotive communication, the conscious, strategic modification of affective signals to influence others through deceptive facial expressions.     

A ‘new life’ story or ‘delaying the inevitable’? Exploring older people's narratives during exercise uptake

ObjectivesThe purpose of this study was to examine narratives of ageing in a clinical population embarking on a physical activity/exercise programme, exploring if and how their narratives changed throughout their experiences.DesignThe study employed a longitudinal narrative approach.MethodParticipants were six sedentary individuals aged between 78 and 89 years who were enrolled on an exercise programme for older adults. During the course of the 32-week programme participants took part in multiple interviews focused on their attitudes towards physical activity and their physical self-perceptions and identity. A structural narrative analysis was used to focus on the progression of the plot outlined in each participant's story.ResultsOur results suggested the emergence of two comparative narratives, with each demonstrated in the stories told by three participants. The first narrative is one of decelerated decline, in which the exercise programme is assimilated or fitted into the existing life narrative, but little is made of the personal meaning of being active. In the second narrative, participation in exercise prompted participants to re-story their ageing narratives, changing from initially accepting the decline they associated with an ageing body, to the prospect of gaining some control. While this increased sense of control may intuitively seem positive, participants initially described a number of existential challenges and dilemmas as well as their resolution of these.ConclusionParticipants' emergent stories highlighted that while older adults may perceive exercise positively, their existing narratives of decline may be resistant to change. Where changes do occur, it is important for health professionals to recognize the associated difficulties with gaining increased responsibility for health.     

Detecting Deceit in Pairs of Children1

This study examined adults’ ability to distinguish between truthful and deceptive pairs of children. Adult observers (N = 88) judged the veracity of one of 22 truthful or deceptive pairs of children (12–13 years). The children were interviewed separately about their real or imagined encounters with an unknown man. Analyses showed that the overall accuracy was 62.5%; significantly better than chance level of 50%. Deception detection accuracy was higher when watching both pair members than when watching one child. The analysis of self‐reported cues to deception given by observers showed that the consistency between the children's statements was the most frequent cue. An analysis of the actual consistency of children's statements showed significantly more contradictions in the deceptive statements.     

Lay Persons' and Police Officers' Beliefs Regarding Deceptive Behaviour

Research on the detection of deception, via non-verbal cues, has shown that people's ability to successfully discriminate between truth and deception is only slightly better than chance level. One of the reasons for these disappointing findings possibly lies in people's inappropriate beliefs regarding ‘lying behaviour’. A 64-item questionnaire originally used in Germany, which targets participants' beliefs regarding truthful and deceptive behaviour, was used. The present study differed from previous research in three ways: (i) instead of a student population, police officers and lay people were sampled, (ii) both people's beliefs regarding others' deceptive behaviour and their beliefs regarding their own deceptive behaviour were examined, and (iii) both non-verbal cues to, and content characteristics of, deceptive statements were examined. Results were consistent with previous studies, which found significant differences between people's beliefs regarding deceptive behaviour and experimental observations of actual deceptive behaviour. Further, police officers held as many false beliefs as did lay people and finally, participants were more accurate in their beliefs regarding their own deceptive behaviour than they were in their beliefs regarding others' behaviour.     

When more is less: failure to compress discourse with re-telling in normal ageing

When young adults tell the same story repeatedly, their narratives become progressively more concise. Although impaired discourse production has been reliably demonstrated in the elderly, changes in narrative production with repetition have not been investigated in this cohort. Thirty young (aged 18-49 years, M=28.77, SD=9.73) and thirty elderly (aged 65+ years, M=73.57, SD=6.80) adults completed a discourse production task involving narrative construction using an eight-frame cartoon. Narratives were repeated 4 consecutive times. Variables analysed were narrative duration, word count and fluency (words/sec). For all variables the compression index for the elderly group was significantly lower than that for young participants. Further, compared to their younger counterparts, elderly adults were less able to improve the cohesion of their narratives with repetition. These findings suggest that the elderly have a reduced capacity to generate and refine discourse representations.     

时间维度在记叙文理解中的作用

采用事件分割范式探讨了中文条件下时间维度在记叙文理解中的作用。实验1在中文条件下重复了Speer和Zacks(2005)年的研究,结果发现读者更多将时间短语所在位置作为分割边界,表明时间转换在情景模型更新中发挥了重要作用。实验2探讨了在没有时间短语条件下读者对文本分割的情况,结果发现读者主要是按照事件单元进行分割;实验3a和3b在文本的事件单元中插入时间短语,形成时间转换与事件转换分离的条件,探讨读者在这种时间转换与事件单元转换不一致的条件下所采用的分割策略,结果表明,读者更多仍然按照事件单元转换进行分割,而且对事件单元转换的依赖强于时间转换,但同时时间短语仍对文本的分割有一定影响。上述结果表明,事件单元作为建构记叙文心理表征的核心单元,时间维度作为事件单元转换的线索,只有在标识事件转换的情况下,才能引发读者情景模型的更新。     

Facial appearance and judgments of credibility: the effects of facial babyishness and age on statement credibility

Researchers have found that facial appearance influences social judgments. For example, evidence has shown that facial babyishness and age affect perceivers' impressions of the stimulus person's veracity. In this experiment, the researchers examined whether these variables also influenced the credibility attributed to written statements purportedly made by these people in addition to several topics of interest in deception-detection research. Undergraduates (N = 270) were presented babyfaced or mature-faced photographs that depicted a child, an adult, or an older individual, in addition to a written truthful or deceptive statement purportedly made by the person in the photograph. Results showed that, as predicted, when the statements were accompanied by babyfaced pictures, participants tended to judge them as truthful, but only if the pictures did not depict children. Also, when the statements were accompanied by childen's pictures, participants tended to judge them as deceptive, but only if the pictures depicted a babyish face. Overall detection accuracy was close to chance and did not correlate with either judgmental confidence or with the respondents' estimated lie-detection accuracy. However, confidence and estimated ability were significantly correlated. Also, more confidence was placed in judgments of truthfulness than in judgments of deceptiveness. Respondents' truth bias and the existence of a veracity effect in the diverse experimental conditions were examined as well.