LP Magazine has reported on the misconceptions between eye movement and deception detection.  They refer to a seminar by Humintell’s director Dr. Matsumoto at the Certified Forensic Interviewer Elite Training Day last November.

The seminar focused on the difficulty in establishing deception or truth and the flaws most people commit when trying to do so.  After reviewing a number of videos, participants were asked to judge whether the person on the video was  being truthful or deceptive and why they were identifying that person as truthful or deceptive.

No surprise to Dr. Matsumoto, many of the participants delineated eye contact (lack of or too much) as a sign of deception and pointed out that the suspect looked left or right as they were being questioned.

It is particularly difficult to define statements of truth when there is no norm (baseline) to observe, no real threat of punishment if caught lying, or no strong emotion to conceal (high stakes situations). Dr. Matsumoto was quick to note that twenty-three of twenty-four research studies finding’s had no support for eye direction as an indicator of truth or deception.

The article goes on to discuss the role of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Recall vs. Creation in the process of predicting truthful vs. deceptive statements.

It points out that eye movements assist in the recovery of memories and speech and establishes that there is a memory search and additional thought taking place. This additional thought could either be of a creative or recall nature.

However, there is no way to establish whether this is the recovery of a truthful detail or the creation of a deceptive component of the story.

Did you have these same misconceptions?  Do you agree with this article?

New research has been formulated regarding a physiological marker for false memories  (not to be confused with lies), bad feelings and sleep.

The Guardian has reported on new research that claims false memories have a psychological marker that can be determined via a simple test that measures the conductance of the skin.

The results of the study are still in their infancy and additional studies should and need to be conducted to completely understand the body/brain’s physical response to memories that never happened.

German researchers used a variation of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm (DRM), a widely used method for establishing false memories, in their experiment.

They used visual stimuli in lieu of word association, used in the regular DRM experiments, to determine the body’s physiological difference between real and false memories.   They found that a stimulus that has already been encountered (a true recollection) will be more significant, to the participant, than one that has not because it is more familiar.  This familiarity can be measured via increased skin conductance; thus, false memories are associated with decreased skin conductance.

One thing to keep in mind in the study’s findings is that false memories are very different than deception.  This difference lies in the person’s awareness.  People are unaware of a false memory; whereas,  they are fully aware of the truth (real memory) when concealing information or lying.

On another note Science News reports that sleep embeds bad memories into the brain while remaining awake after a traumatic event lessens the emotional toll of the event.

The study’s findings published in the Journal of Neuroscience suggest that people who slept well after an unpleasant experience had a better recollection of that event while those that stayed awake did not.

Cognitive neuroscientist Jessica Payne of the University of Notre Dame, points out an observation that sleep deprivation leads to increased stress, which can profoundly influence emotions.   She states, “In most cases, it’s better to sleep than to not sleep.”

This is can be relevant to post-traumatic stress disorder.  The bigger question in this research is whether sleep just embeds the memory of the event or has a greater impact via changing how you feel about the event if you experience it again.

It is important to point out that there are other studies that have conflicting findings suggesting that sleep can help emotionally with traumatic experiences.