Cognitive Psychology seminars

I my talk I will give an overview of recent research on deception and concealed information detection. I will start with a short introduction on the problems and shortcomings of traditional deception detection tools and why those still prevail in many recent approaches (e.g., in AI-based deception detection). I want to argue for the importance of more fundamental deception research and give some examples for insights gained therefrom. In the second part of the talk, I will introduce the Concealed Information Test (CIT), a promising paradigm for research and applied contexts to investigate whether someone actually recognizes information that they do not want to reveal. The CIT is based on solid scientific theory and produces large effects sizes in laboratory studies with a number of different measures (e.g., behavioral, psychophysiological, and neural measures). I will highlight some challenges a forensic application of the CIT still faces and how scientific research could assist in overcoming those.

The goal of this pilot study is to develop a test through which people with extraordinary voice recognition and discrimination skills can be found (for forensic purposes). Since interest in this field has emerged, three studies have been published with the goal of finding people with potential super-recognition skills in voice processing. One of them is a discrimination test and two are recognition tests, but neither combines the two test scenarios and their test designs cannot be directly compared to a casework scenario in forensics phonetics. The pilot study at hand attempts to bridge this gap and analyses if the skills of voice discrimination and recognition correlate. The study is guided by a practical, forensic application, which further complicates the process of creating a viable test. The participants for the pilot consist of different classes of police cadets, which means the test can be redone and adjusted over time.