Research On Attentional Bias Towards Lying Related Information In Liars

Lying,as a self-interested behavior,usually occurs in situations which requires selfprotection.Brain always tends to pay attention to threat-related stimuli and negative emotional information when individuals in a dangerous environment.In the past,most of the researches on lying carried out memory detection of case information from the perspective of memory,and there were few studies on attentional bias caused by lying.From the perspective of attentional bias,this study makes use of the event-related potential technology to investigate the difference in attentional processing of various category stimuli between liars and honest people and to explore the reasons for this difference in order to better serve the polygraph research work.In experiment 1,a 2(subjects,honest/ liar)×3(words,honesty related/ lying related/ neutral)two factors mixed experimental design was used to investigate the attentional bias of liars towards lying related words,adopting the word Stroop paradigm.Experiment 2 also adopted a 2(subjects,honest/ liar)×3(face pictures,positive emotion/ negative emotion/ neutral)two-factor mixed experimental design to investigate liars’ attentional bias toward emotional face cues through the emotional face Stroop paradigm.The results showed that:(1)There was no significant difference in response towards three types of words between the lying and honest groups.And ERP results showed that the P2 and P3 components in the lying subjects generated a significantly higher amplitude of lying related words not only than honest related words but the honest subjects.(2)The lying subjects recalled significantly more lying related words than honest.Also,lying subjects perform a significantly higher recall of lying related words than honest related and neutral.(3)The lying subjects perform a longer reaction time than honest in all three sorts of faces,also showed a more significant difference in negative emotional faces than the honest subjects.(4)The incubation periods of C1 and P1 were earlier in the lying subjects than honest.And compared with positive emotional faces and neutral,lower N1 and N2 amplitude,higher P2 and P3 amplitude were observed on negative emotional faces in lying subjects.Conclusions:(1)When individuals lying,lie related words are more attractive to the brain,which raising the liar’s attentional bias.(2)Lying increased sensitivity to surrounding information of liars,also weaken the individual ability to suppress negative emotional arousal,and triggers the liar’s attentional bias to negative emotional images.(3)In the lying subjects,more attention was paid to the words related to lying,which enhanced the probability of unintentional memorization of the words related to lying in the brain and triggered the individual memory bias towards the lying related words.(4)Emotion plays an important role in the liar’s attentional bias.Liars had state anxiety when they lying,and the significantly increased anxiety promoted the attentional bias towards lying related and negative emotional information.(5)The difference in attentional bias caused by negative emotional pictures is more significant than lying related words.It is more efficient and easier to encode the emotional images when stimulus under shallow processing in liars,which also means that emotional images are maybe easier to process and understand for less educated suspects.