Dr. John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and colleagues have recently shown that using brain scans they can predict with fairly high accuracy which of two choices test subjects will choose when deciding to add or subtract two numbers.
To address the question of whether intention might be reflected in prefrontal cortical activity, the researchers in the new work used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess brain activity while subjects concentrated on their choice of intended mental action, but prior to execution of the action. Specifically, subjects were free to choose between adding or subtracting two numbers and were asked to hold in mind their intention until numbers were presented on a screen, along with a choice of outcomes (one of which was correct for the addition choice, one correct for the subtraction choice). Subjects then selected the correct answer according to their planned task, revealing their intended action.
The researchers found that during the delay between the subjects' choice of task and execution of the task, it was possible to decode from activities in two regions of the prefrontal cortex which of the two actions (addition or subtraction) individuals had chosen to pursue. Different patterns of activity were seen during actual execution of the task, showing that regionally distinct neural substrates were involved in task preparation and execution. Decoding of intentions was most robust when activity patterns in the medial prefrontal cortex were taken into account, consistent with the idea that this region of the brain participating in the reflection of an individual on his or her own mental state.
Are you ever bothered that this sort of research takes all the mystery out of life? Do you start seeing humans as less lofty and noble intentions as no better than the most criminal and vicious intentions?
Their computer model which analyses brain scans can predict the right answer 70% of the time.
Our secret intentions remain concealed until we put them into action -so we believe. Now researchers have been able to decode these secret intentions from patterns of their brain activity. They let subjects freely and covertly choose between two possible tasks - to either add or subtract two numbers. They were then asked to hold in mind their intention for a while until the relevant numbers were presented on a screen. The researchers were able to recognize the subjects intentions with 70% accuracy based alone on their brain activity - even before the participants had seen the numbers and had started to perform the calculation.
Imagine one could develop an algorithm to analyse brain scans that can detect the intention to lie. Such a capability would make a great lie detector. Another use? To operate robotic prostheses.
Intentions exist in a network of neurons.
The study also reveals fundamental principles about the way the brain stores intentions. "The experiments show that intentions are not encoded in single neurons but in a whole spatial pattern of brain activity", says Haynes. They furthermore reveal that different regions of the prefrontal cortex perform different operations. Regions towards the front of the brain store the intention until it is executed, whereas regions further back take over when subjects become active and start doing the calculation. "Intentions for future actions that are encoded in one part of the brain need to be copied to a different region to be executed", says Haynes.
Whenever I think of brain scans done by governments I think of Mick Jagger singing "These days its all secrecy, no privacy".
The researchers say the eye pictures were probably influential because the brain naturally reacts to images of faces and eyes. It seems people were subconsciously cooperating with the honesty box when it featured pictures of eyes rather than flowers.
They also say the findings show how people behave differently when they believe they are being watched because they are worried what others will think of them. Being seen to co-operate is a good long-term strategy for individuals because it is likely to mean others will return the gesture when needed.
Details of the experiment, believed to be the first to test how cues of being watched affect people's tendency for social co-operation in a real-life setting, are published today, Wednesday June 28, in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.
An honesty box is a system of payment which relies on people's honesty to pay a specified price for goods or services - there is no cashier to check whether they are doing so.
For this experiment, lead researcher Dr Melissa Bateson and her colleagues Drs Daniel Nettle and Gilbert Roberts, of the Evolution and Behaviour Research Group in the School of Biology and Psychology at Newcastle University, made use of a long-running 'honesty box' arrangement.
This had been operating as a way of paying for hot drinks in a common room used by around 48 staff for many years, so users had no reason to suspect an experiment was taking place.
An A5 poster was placed above the honesty box, listing prices of tea, coffee and milk. The poster also featured an image banner across the top, and this alternated each week between different pictures of flowers and images of eyes.
The eye pictures varied in the sex and head orientation but were all chosen so that the eyes were looking directly at the observer.
Each week the research team recorded the total amount of money collected and the volume of milk consumed as this was considered to be the best index available of total drink consumption.
The team then calculated the ratio of money collected to the volume of milk consumed in each week. On average, people paid 2.76 as much for their drinks on the weeks when the poster featured pictures of eyes.
Lead author of the study, Melissa Bateson, a Royal Society research fellow based at Newcastle University, said: "Our brains are programmed to respond to eyes and faces whether we are consciously aware of it or not.
"I was really surprised by how big the effect was as we were expecting it to be quite subtle but the statistics show that the eyes had a strong effect on our tea and coffee drinkers."
Those nations with massive posters of dictators staring down on every street probably have lower crime rates as a result.
This result seems like it has all sorts of obvious immediate results. Parents could put posters of eyes in rooms where their kids might be tempted to misbehave when the parents are not around. Posters of eyes could get put up in bus and train stations to see if the posters deter pick-pockets. Posters of eyes in workplaces might make people less likely to laze off.
One obvious direction for further research would be to try different kinds of faces and facial expressions to see if some faces make people work harder or to treat people more politely on technical support phone calls or otherwise perform better and more honestly in work situations.
Would people in workplaces feel more stressed when eyes in posters look down upon them?
In public places such as town squares, train stations, and airports which have video surveillance cameras (aka CCTVs) would the cameras be more effective in deterring crime if combined with a poster of eyes mounted above them to emphasize to people that they are being watched?
Higher accuracy lie detection technology is coming to market.
Two companies plan to market the first lie-detecting devices that use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and say the new tests can spot liars with 90% accuracy.
No Lie MRI plans to begin offering brain-based lie-detector tests in Philadelphia in late July or August, says Joel Huizenga, founder of the San Diego-based start-up. Cephos Corp. of Pepperell, Mass., will offer a similar service later this year using MRI machines at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, says its president, Steven Laken.
Both rely in part on recent research funded by the federal government aimed at producing a foolproof method of detecting deception.
Lie detection will become a huge market. It will change personal relationships, marriages, the criminal justice system (I love tools that can exonerate the innocent), the hunt for terrorists, and raise honesty in business dealings.
Want to settle an argument where one party does not trust the other's claims? Even better, how about those arguments where both sides say the other is lying? The solution (assuming you don't mind the 90% accuracy rate) is quite affordable.
No Lie MRI plans to charge $30 a minute to use its device. Cephos has not yet set a price.
Have any disagreements with suspected liars that would be worth at least $30 to verify truth or dishonesty?
Be on the look-out for VeraCenters.
No Lie MRI will debut its services this July in Philadelphia, where it will demonstrate the technology to be used in a planned network of facilities the company is calling VeraCenters. Each facility will house a scanner connected to a central computer in California. As the client responds to questions using a handheld device, the imaging data will be fed to the computer, which will classify each answer as truthful or deceptive using software developed by Langleben's team.
Temple University radiologist Scott Faro sees lie detectors as great money savers.
"People say fMRI is expensive," Faro continues, "but what's the cost of a six-month jury trial? And what's the cost to America for missing a terrorist? If this is a more accurate test, I don't see any moral issues at all. People who can afford it and believe they are telling the truth are going to love this test."
The more parties to a disagreement the less the problem of the only 90% success rate. Ask several employees in a company or suspected members of a terrorist ring some hard questions. See where they all line up in terms of their answers and the fMRI machine's assessements.
The US federal government prevents private companies from using the cost savings of lie detection. This'll become an incentive to move work offshore when business needs place a very high value on honesty and trustworthiness.
No Lie MRI's plans to market its services to corporations will likely run afoul of the 1988 Employee Polygraph Protection Act, which bars the use of lie-detection tests by most private companies for personnel screening. Government employers, however, are exempt from this law, which leaves a huge potential market for fMRI in local, state, and federal agencies, as well as in the military.
I wonder if lie detection will be allowed in divorce cases? "Have you disclosed all your sources of income and all assets?" Or how about "Have you ever done illegal drugs while you had custody of the kids?"
I'm reminded of Mick Jagger singing "These days its all secrecy, no privacy". So much for the privacy of your own thoughts.
Traditional polygraph tests to determine whether someone is lying may take a back seat to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), according to a study appearing in the February issue of Radiology. Researchers from Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia used fMRI to show how specific areas of the brain light up when a person tells a lie.
"We have detected areas of the brain activated by deception and truth-telling by using a method that is verifiable against the current gold standard method of lie detection--the conventional polygraph," said lead author Feroze B. Mohamed, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Radiology at Temple.
Dr. Mohamed explained how the standard polygraph test has failed to produce consistently reliable results, largely because it relies on outward manifestations of certain emotions that people feel when lying. These manifestations, including increased perspiration, changing body positions and subtle facial expressions, while natural, can be suppressed by a large enough number of people that the accuracy and consistency of the polygraph results are compromised.
"Since brain activation is arguably less susceptible to being controlled by an individual, our research will hopefully eliminate the shortcomings of the conventional polygraph test and produce a new method of objective lie detection that can be used reliably in a courtroom or other setting," Dr. Mohamed said.
Dr. Mohamed and colleagues recruited 11 healthy subjects for the study. A mock shooting was staged, in which blank bullets were fired in a testing room. Five volunteers were asked to tell the truth when asked a series of questions about their involvement, and six were asked to deliberately lie. Each volunteer was examined with fMRI to observe brain activation while they answered questions either truthfully or deceptively. They also underwent a conventional polygraph test, where respiration, cardiovascular activity and perspiration responses were monitored. The same questions were asked in both examinations, and results were compared among the groups.
"With fMRI, there were consistently unique areas of the brain, and more of them, that were activated during the deceptive process than during truth-telling," Dr. Mohamed said. In producing a deceptive response, a person must inhibit or conceal the truth, which activates parts of the brain that are not required for truth-telling. Thus, fewer areas of the brain are active when telling the truth.
Fourteen areas of the brain were active during the deceptive process. In contrast, only seven areas lit up when subjects answered truthfully.
By studying the images, investigators were able to develop a better picture of the deception process in the brain. The increased activity in the frontal lobe, especially, indicated how the brain works to inhibit the truth and construct a lie.
Will some people with special intellectual talents be able to develop the ability to fool a functional MRI scan?
Will brain scans be able to always detect a lie?
CHICAGO – When people lie, they use different parts of their brains than when they tell the truth, and these brain changes can be measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), according to a study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. The results suggest that fMRI may one day prove a more accurate lie detector than the polygraph.
"There may be unique areas in the brain involved in deception that can be measured with fMRI," said lead author Scott H. Faro, M.D. "We were able to create consistent and robust brain activation related to a real-life deception process." Dr. Faro is professor and vice-chairman of radiology and director of the Functional Brain Imaging Center and Clinical MRI at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia.
The researchers created a relevant situation for 11 normal volunteers. Six of the volunteers were asked to shoot a toy gun with blank bullets and then to lie about their participation. The non-shooters were asked to tell the truth about the situation. The researchers examined the individuals with fMRI, while simultaneously administering a polygraph exam. The polygraph measured three physiologic responses: respiration, blood pressure and galvanic skin conductance, or the skin's ability to conduct electricity, which increases when an individual perspires.
The volunteers were asked questions that pertained to the situation, along with unrelated control questions. In all cases, the polygraph and fMRI accurately distinguished truthful responses from deceptive ones. fMRI showed activation in several areas of the brain during the deception process. These areas were located in the frontal (medial inferior and pre-central), temporal (hippocampus and middle temporal), and limbic (anterior and posterior cingulate) lobes. During a truthful response, the fMRI showed activation in the frontal lobe (inferior and medial), temporal lobe (inferior) and cingulate gyrus.
Overall, there were regional differences in activation between deceptive and truthful conditions. Furthermore, there were more areas of the brain activated during the deception process compared to the truth-telling condition.
Dr. Faro's study is the first to use polygraph correlation and a modified version of positive control questioning techniques in conjunction with fMRI. It is also the first to involve a real-life stimulus. "I believe this is a vital approach to understand this very complex type of cognitive behavior," Dr. Faro said. "The real-life stimulus is critical if this technique is to be developed into a practical test of deception."
Because physiologic responses can vary among individuals and, in some cases, can be regulated, the polygraph is not considered a wholly reliable means of lie detection. According to Dr. Faro, it is too early to tell if fMRI can be "fooled" in the same manner.
However, these results are promising in that they suggest a consistency in brain patterns that might be beyond conscious control.
"We have just begun to understand the potential of fMRI in studying deceptive behavior," Dr. Faro said. "We plan to investigate the potential of fMRI both as a stand-alone test and as a supplement to the polygraph with the goal of creating the most accurate test for deception."
Dr. Faro's co-authors on this paper were Feroze Mohamed, Ph.D., Nathan Gordon, M.S., Steve Platek, Ph.D, Mike Williams, Ph.D., and Harris Ahmad, M.D.
Faro wants money from national security agencies for larger studies.
Will fMRI stand alone as a test for deception? Dr. Faro admits he's not yet sure: "The polygraph looks at only peripheral stimulus as the end result of a long chain of primary central areas of activation of the brain. We're now getting to the origin of the activation."
Dr. Faro called the results "promising" and said he hopes to gain the interest of major organizations such as the Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Administration or the CIA to help fund further research and larger group studies using the same methods, but he says the technology is expensive.
"It's probably going to be used on the academic side to understand psycho-social behavior, and on the criminal side, it's going to be used for major criminals," said Dr. Faro. "We're looking at areas of tremendous concern with terrorism, where the expense is minimal compared to the potential disaster. Looking at industrial or business-related crimes, certainly Martha Stewart could afford this test if she was truly interested."
Imagine people negotiating a huge business deal demonstrating their sincerity by agreeing to a brain scan while being asked questions about whether they intend to go through with a deal in good faith. Questions about each of the commitments in the contract could be asked. Will that give an advantage to superficial people who are sincere but prone to changing their minds? How much do intentions matter?
Update: One thought: If one dreams up a lie well ahead of time (like days or weeks) will its recall look more like a truth on a brain scan? If one can fantasize the lie and make it into something like a real memory it might require less mental effort to recall and/or construct than a lie made up on the spot. Therefore in a brain scan it might look more like a regular memory.
Hand-held lie detectors appear to be useless.
"We tested one of the more popular voice-stress lie detection technologies and got dismal results, both in the system's ability to detect people actually engaged in deception and in its ability to exclude those not attempting to be deceptive," said Mitchell S. Sommers, an associate professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
"In our evaluation, voice-stress analysis detected some instances of deception, but its ability to do so was consistently less than chance — you could have gotten better results by flipping a coin," Sommers said.
Sommers' research was supported by and conducted in conjunction with the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute (DODPI), located in Fort Jackson, S.C. Findings were presented at the World Congress of International Conference of Psychophysiology in July 2002. An academic paper on the study is under review for journal publication.
Sommers' study assessed the ability of Vericator, a computer-based system that evaluates credibility through slight variations in a person's speech, to detect deception in a number of different scenarios. Participants were questioned using different forms of interrogation and under conditions inducing various levels of stress.
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"Voice-stress analysis is fairly effective in identifying certain variations in stress levels in human speech, but high levels of stress do not necessarily correlate with deception," Sommers said. "It may someday be possible to refine voice-stress analysis so that it is capable of distinguishing among various sources of stress and accurately identifying those that are directly related to deception. However, all the research that I've seen thus far suggests that it's wishful thinking, at best, to suggest that current voice-stress analysis systems are capable or reliably detecting deception."
My guess is that a high resolution image processing system that analyzed facial muscle changes would have a better chance of working. Take Paul Ekman's research into his Facial Action Coding System (FACS) and develop an automated means of using it and it might be possible to build a useful lie detector.