Mapping of the brain activation associated with deception using fused EEG and fNIRS

Abstract

In this study, concurrent electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) recordings were performed based on a modified concealed information test (CIT) task to examine the relationship between the hemodynamic signal of the frontal cortex and event-related potential (ERP) component of P300 for high-sensitivity deception detection. In particular, both the fNIRS data and ERP component of P300 were carefully inspected for participants from both the guilty group and innocent groups. During the performance of CIT task, a series of names were presented, which served as the target, irrelevant, or the probe stimuli for the two groups. The guilty participant who assumed himself (herself) as a spy was instructed to deny the recognition of probe (his (her) own name).Interestingly, we discovered that for the guilty group, the probe stimuli elicited significantly larger P300 at parietal site and also evoked significantly higher HbO concentration changes in bilateral superior frontal gyrus and bilateral middle frontal gyrus than the irrelevants stimuli. However, this is not the case for the innocent group, in which participants didn’t exhibit significant difference in both ERP and fNIRS recordings between the probe and irrelevants stimuli cases. More importantly, our findings also indicated that the combined ERP and fNIRS signals can distinguish well between the guilty and innocent groups, in which AUC (the area under Receiver Operating Characteristic curve) is 0.91 for deception detection based on the combined indicator, much higher than that based on ERP components P300 (0.85) or fNIRS signals (0.84).