Detecting concealed information using functional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) combined with skin conductance, heart rate, and behavioral measures

In this study, brain imaging data from functional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) associated with skin conductance response (SCR), heart rate (HR), and reaction time (RT) were combined to determine if the combination of these indicators could improve the efficiency of deception detection in concealed information test (CIT). During the CIT, participants were presented with a series of names and cities that served as target, probe, or irrelevant stimuli. In the guilty group, the probe stimuli were the participants’ own names and hometown cities, and they were asked to deny this information. Our results revealed that probe items were associated with longer RT, larger SCR, slower HR, and higher oxyhemoglobin (HbO) concentration changes in the inferior prefrontal gyrus (IFG), middle frontal gyrus (MFG), and the superior frontal gyrus (SFG) compared with irrelevant items for participants in the guilty group but not in the innocent group. Furthermore, our results suggested that the combination of RT, SCR, HR, and fNIRS indicators could improve the deception detection efficiency to a very high area under the ROC curve (0.94) compared with any of the single indicators (0.74–0.89). The improved deception detection efficiency might be attributed to the reduction of random error and the diversiform underlying the psychophysiological mechanisms reflected by each indicator. These findings demonstrate a feasible way to improve the deception detection efficiency by using combined multiple indicators. The current study demonstrates the use of multiple indicators as a feasible method to improve the detection of deception with a high detection efficiency (0.94). This is the first study to combine brain imaging data from fNIRS with SCR, HR and RT to detect deception in a concealed information test.