Abstract
The purpose of the present study is to differentiate between innocent suspects who have knowledge of crime information and guilty suspects. The study investigated eye-movement differences among three groups: a guilty group who took part in a mock crime, an innocent-aware group who did not commit a mock crime but were exposed to the crime stimuli, and an innocent-unaware group who neither committed a mock crime nor had crime-relevant information. Each group's eye movements were tracked while all participants viewed stimuli (crime-relevant, crime-irrelevant, and neutral). The results revealed that the guilty group not only viewed all stimuli later than the other groups, they also viewed crime-relevant and crime-irrelevant stimuli for a shorter time period than the innocent-aware group; the innocent-aware group focused their attention on crime-relevant and crime-irrelevant stimuli longer than neutral stimuli, and the innocent-unaware group showed no differences in their attention focus among all types of stimuli. This present study suggests that guilty individuals show attentional avoidance from all stimuli in a lie detection situation, whereas innocent-aware and innocent-unaware individuals did not show avoidance responses.
Highlights
The Guilty Knowledge Test (GKT) or the Concealed Information Test (CIT) is a deception detection method and is intended to establish the existence of a specific memory trace [1,2,3]
GKT relies on a solid scientific principle, called an orienting response (OR), which is an elicited response caused by a novel stimulus or a familiar stimulus with relevance or “signal value” [5, 6], and it has been shown that guilty knowledge has an added signal value [7]
We investigated the eye-movement differences among three groups: a guilty group who committed a mock crime, an innocent-aware group who did not commit a mock crime but were naturally exposed to guilty knowledge, and an innocent-unaware group who did not have any knowledge of the crime and did not commit a mock crime
Summary
The Guilty Knowledge Test (GKT) or the Concealed Information Test (CIT) is a deception detection method and is intended to establish the existence of a specific memory trace [1,2,3]. GKT relies on a solid scientific principle, called an orienting response (OR), which is an elicited response caused by a novel stimulus or a familiar stimulus with relevance or “signal value” [5, 6], and it has been shown that guilty knowledge has an added signal value [7]. People who have guilty knowledge show a stronger OR to crimerelevant questions than to other questions, whereas all questions elicit equivalent responses from truth tellers. Laboratory research has reported that the GKT has high validity coefficients for the differentiation between guilty and innocent persons on the basis of autonomic measures such as skin conductance responses, respiration, heart rate, the P300 event-related potential [8,9,10,11], and can be generalized to the criminal field [12, 13].
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