Deception Detection: Where do I look, Upper Face or Lower Face?

Abstract

Human’s ability to detect deception has an unsettling result of around chance detection (Depaulo et al., 2003; Bond & DePaulo, 2008). Both Experiment 1 and 2 tracked participant’s eye fixations during the process of detecting a lie. Participants were asked to make veracity judgements of people telling the truth or a lie (Ruffman et al., 2012), while their eye fixations were being recorded. Experiment 1 Results: During the deception detection, undergraduates made greater proportion of fixations to the upper face. However, it was increases in lower face looking that correlated with accuracy of deception detection. Undergraduates could have been using deceptions located in the lower face, of discomfort, tensions, negative expressions (Ruffman et al., unpublished). Experiment 2 assessed whether similar accuracy would be obtained, if sound were removed. Experiment 2 Results: The removal of auditory information severely impaired their ability to detect deception to around chance, however their eye gaze behaviour differed when looking at truth from lie videos. This is, while participants were not consciously able to detect deception, sub-consciously they are perceiving a difference between the truth and lie videos. Furthermore, in both experiments participants fixated proportionately more in the truth condition. The combination of results from Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 does show that the detection of older adult (60+) lies and truths were greatly affected by auditory information. In such that the removal of auditory information significantly impaired the detection of their lies by undergraduates students.