Opinion
Detecting deception: the scope and limits

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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.

Section snippets

Deception in experimental settings

The neuroimaging of deception has raised considerable interest and controversy that reaches well beyond academic circles 1, 2, 3, 4. There has been much discussion of the validity and possible real-life application of this new and rapidly developing field. The brain imaging community must be prepared for the increasing commercialization of these techniques and their use in legal cases and by the security industry. We would argue the need for caution in putting the results of experimental

Cognitive processes associated with deception

Executive processes enable humans to navigate successfully through deceptive communicative interactions by going through a series of cognitive operations, which are repeated if necessary (Box 1). Our intentional goals are directed to satisfying our aims on the basis of cooperation and trust. If deception is a goal, the most basic scenario requires inhibition of prepotent truth responses to make others believe what we want them to believe. Furthermore, representation of truth under the pretence

The view from neuroscience: evidence for many systems

As has been demonstrated extensively over the past decade, the cognitive processes involved in social interactions, such as occur during deception, map onto a wide range of cortical and subcortical networks. Furthermore, the activation of a specific region of the human brain is rarely affiliated to only one such cognitive process.

Neuroimaging studies of deception

As can be seen in the tasks listed in Table 1[19], much ingenuity has gone into developing novel formats for the laboratory study of deception. For example, comparisons have been made between spontaneous and prepared lies, with additional personal involvement implemented by contrasting autobiographical and non-autobiographical experience 19, 20. Perhaps the study that gets closest to real life is that of Abe et al. [21]. This study introduced a novel twist, in which one experimenter instructed

What can fMRI add in the search for neural markers of deception?

As rightly stressed by Wolpe et al. [5], traditional paradigms used to detect deceptive behavior, such as the polygraph, have many disadvantages. Can the newer techniques of brain imaging make the breakthrough from the laboratory and provide key evidence about deception for use in criminal cases? In our opinion, the problems with which the old technology has struggled have not been eliminated by the new technology (fMRI, electro-encephalography, near-infrared etc.). There is no doubt that the

The future: how can the study of deception be improved?

Given the current results of neuroimaging studies of deception and the current controversies surrounding the topic, we suggest that there are two key factors that need to be considered to improve the study of deception. First, we must recognize that deception involves a social dimension and needs to be studied as such (Box 2, Box 3). In particular, the pragmatics of social interaction need to be considered in further research [8]. We must recognize that deception can occur in the absence of

Acknowledgements

Our work is supported by the Danish Research Council for Culture and Communication, The Danish National Research Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.

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