Perspective taking and theory of mind in hide and seek.

Does theory of mind play a significant role in where people choose to hide an item or where they search for an item that has been hidden? Adapting Anderson's "Hide-Find Paradigm" Anderson et al. (Action, Perception and Performance, 76, 907-913, 2014) participants viewed homogenous or popout visual arrays on a touchscreen table. Their task was to indicate where in the array they would hide an item, or to search for an item that had been hidden, by either a friend or a foe. Critically, participants believed that their sitting location at the touchtable was the same as-or opposite to-their partner's location. Replicating Anderson et al., participants tended to (1) select items nearer to themselves on homogenous displays, and this bias was stronger for a friend than foe; and (2) select popout items, and again, more for a friend than foe. These biases were observed only when participants believed that they shared the same physical perspective as their partner. Collectively, the data indicate that theory of mind plays a significant role in hiding and finding, and demonstrate that the hide-find paradigm is a powerful tool for investigating theory of mind in adults.

Aligning Spinoza with Descartes: An informed Cartesian account of the truth bias.

There is a bias towards believing information is true rather than false. The Spinozan account claims there is an early, automatic bias towards believing. Only afterwards can people engage in an effortful re-evaluation and disbelieve the information. Supporting this account, there is a greater bias towards believing information is true when under cognitive load. However, developing on the Adaptive Lie Detector (ALIED) theory, the informed Cartesian can equally explain this data. The account claims the bias under load is not evidence of automatic belief; rather, people are undecided, but if forced to guess they can rely on context information to make an informed judgement. The account predicts, and we found, that if people can explicitly indicate their uncertainty, there should be no bias towards believing because they are no longer required to guess. Thus, we conclude that belief formation can be better explained by an informed Cartesian account - an attempt to make an informed judgment under uncertainty.

The focal account: Indirect lie detection need not access unconscious, implicit knowledge.

People are poor lie detectors, but accuracy can be improved by making the judgment indirectly. In a typical demonstration, participants are not told that the experiment is about deception at all. Instead, they judge whether the speaker appears, say, tense or not. Surprisingly, these indirect judgments better reflect the speaker's veracity. A common explanation is that participants have an implicit awareness of deceptive behavior, even when they cannot explicitly identify it. We propose an alternative explanation. Attending to a range of behaviors, as explicit raters do, can lead to conflict: A speaker may be thinking hard (indicating deception) but not tense (indicating honesty). In 2 experiments, we show that the judgment (and in turn the correct classification rate) is the result of attending to a single behavior, as indirect raters are instructed to do. Indirect lie detection does not access implicit knowledge, but simply focuses the perceiver on more useful cues.

The source of the truth bias: Heuristic processing?

People believe others are telling the truth more often than they actually are; this is called the truth bias. Surprisingly, when a speaker is judged at multiple points across their statement the truth bias declines. Previous claims argue this is evidence of a shift from (biased) heuristic processing to (reasoned) analytical processing. In four experiments we contrast the heuristic-analytic model (HAM) with alternative accounts. In Experiment 1, the decrease in truth responding was not the result of speakers appearing more deceptive, but was instead attributable to the rater's processing style. Yet contrary to HAMs, across three experiments we found the decline in bias was not related to the amount of processing time available (Experiments 1-3) or the communication channel (Experiment 2). In Experiment 4 we found support for a new account: that the bias reflects whether raters perceive the statement to be internally consistent.

A simple algorithm for the offline recalibration of eye-tracking data through best-fitting linear transformation.

Poor calibration and inaccurate drift correction can pose severe problems for eye-tracking experiments requiring high levels of accuracy and precision. We describe an algorithm for the offline correction of eye-tracking data. The algorithm conducts a linear transformation of the coordinates of fixations that minimizes the distance between each fixation and its closest stimulus. A simple implementation in MATLAB is also presented. We explore the performance of the correction algorithm under several conditions using simulated and real data, and show that it is particularly likely to improve data quality when many fixations are included in the fitting process.

Exploring the movement dynamics of deception.

BOTH THE SCIENCE AND THE EVERYDAY PRACTICE OF DETECTING A LIE REST ON THE SAME ASSUMPTION: hidden cognitive states that the liar would like to remain hidden nevertheless influence observable behavior. This assumption has good evidence. The insights of professional interrogators, anecdotal evidence, and body language textbooks have all built up a sizeable catalog of non-verbal cues that have been claimed to distinguish deceptive and truthful behavior. Typically, these cues are discrete, individual behaviors-a hand touching a mouth, the rise of a brow-that distinguish lies from truths solely in terms of their frequency or duration. Research to date has failed to establish any of these non-verbal cues as a reliable marker of deception. Here we argue that perhaps this is because simple tallies of behavior can miss out on the rich but subtle organization of behavior as it unfolds over time. Research in cognitive science from a dynamical systems perspective has shown that behavior is structured across multiple timescales, with more or less regularity and structure. Using tools that are sensitive to these dynamics, we analyzed body motion data from an experiment that put participants in a realistic situation of choosing, or not, to lie to an experimenter. Our analyses indicate that when being deceptive, continuous fluctuations of movement in the upper face, and somewhat in the arms, are characterized by dynamical properties of less stability, but greater complexity. For the upper face, these distinctions are present despite no apparent differences in the overall amount of movement between deception and truth. We suggest that these unique dynamical signatures of motion are indicative of both the cognitive demands inherent to deception and the need to respond adaptively in a social context.

Joint perception: gaze and social context.

We found that the way people looked at images was influenced by their belief that others were looking too. If participants believed that an unseen other person was also looking at what they could see, it shifted the balance of their gaze between negative and positive images. The direction of this shift depended upon whether participants thought that later they would be compared against the other person or would be collaborating with them. Changes in the social context influenced both gaze and memory processes, and were not due just to participants' belief that they are looking at the same images, but also to the belief that they are doing the same task. We believe that the phenomenon of joint perception reveals the pervasive and subtle effect of social context upon cognitive and perceptual processes.