Conversing with a devil’s advocate: Interpersonal coordination in deception and disagreement

abstract: This study investigates the presence of dynamical patterns of interpersonal coordination in extended deceptive conversations across multimodal channels of behavior. Using a novel "devil’s advocate" paradigm, we experimentally elicited deception and truth across topics in which conversational partners either agreed or disagreed, and where one partner was surreptitiously asked to argue an opinion opposite of what he or she really believed. We focus on interpersonal coordination as an emergent behavioral signal that captures interdependencies between conversational partners, both as the coupling of head movements over the span of milliseconds, measured via a windowed lagged cross correlation (WLCC) technique, and more global temporal dependencies across speech rate, using cross recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA). Moreover, we considered how interpersonal coordination might be shaped by strategic, adaptive conversational goals associated with deception. We found that deceptive conversations displayed more structured speech rate and higher head movement coordination, the latter with a peak in deceptive disagreement conversations. Together the results allow us to posit an adaptive account, whereby interpersonal coordination is not beholden to any single functional explanation, but can strategically adapt to diverse conversational demands.The article is published at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.017814

Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 217, March 1981

Approximately 130 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in February 1981 are included in this bibliography. Topics include aerospace medicine and biology

Machine Analysis of Facial Expressions

No abstract

The Use of Patterns to Disguise Environmental Cues During an Anticipatory Judgment Task

A number of novel manipulations to the design of playing uniforms were used to try to disguise the actions of penalty takers in soccer. Skilled and less-skilled soccer goalkeepers were required to anticipate penalty kick outcome while their opponent wore one of three different uniform designs that were intended to disguise the availability of potentially key information from the hip region. Variations of shapes/patterns were designed to conceal the actual alignment of the hips. Three occlusion points were used in the test film: -160 ms, -80 ms before, and at foot-ball contact. Skilled individuals reported higher accuracy scores than their less-skilled counterparts (p .05); however, the skilled group decreased their accuracy on the experimental conditions compared with the control (p < .05). Findings highlight the potential benefits of designing playing uniforms that facilitate disguise in sport

Uncovering the Hidden Cognitive Processes and Underlying Dynamics of Deception

This dissertation examines the processing demands associated with motor responding and verbal statements during deceptive (or deceptive-like) behavior. In the first set of studies presented in Chapter 2, participants motor movements in a false response paradigm revealed signatures of competition with the truth. In a second set of studies presented in Chapter 3, deceptive participants used language that reflected cognitive and social demands inherent to various types of deception. In evaluating both motor and verbal cues, this dissertation provides a comprehensive, multi-modal approach to better understanding the cognitive processes underlying deception. in conducting the motor responding studies, participants\u27 arm movements were analyzed as they navigated a motor tracking device (computer-mouse, Nintendo Wiimote). To visually co-present response options, where the true option acts as a competitor to a false target. In an initial study, competition during deceptive responding was shown to be much greater than during truthful responding. In two follow-up studies, the introduction of various task-based cognitive demands was shown to systematically modulate response performance. Specifically, these studies suggest that an intention to false respond early in question presentation will amplify competition effects, and that false responding to information in autobiographical memory is much more difficult than responding to information in general semantic memory. In the studies analyzing verbal statements, the focus is turned to large-scale linguistic analyses using automated natural language processing tools. In the first study, changes in language use were identifed between deceptive and truthful narratives using six psychologically relevant categories. A major finding was that the language of deception is adapted to faciliate ease of cognitive processing. In a second study, the indicative phrasing and semantic content of deceptive texts was extracted using a contrastive corpus analysis, whereby indicative features are defined by frequent use in one corpus while being infrequent in a comparative corpus. Two contexts of deception were evaluated. In the first context of computer-mediated conversations, decievers used a range of unique thematic elements, as in avoiding personal involvement in their narrative accounts. In the second context of attitudes towards abortion, unique thematic elements once again emerged; for example, participants tended to position their arguments in terms of formal law