An electroencephalography network and connectivity analysis for deception in instructed lying tasks.

Deception is an impactful social event that has been the focus of an abundance of researches over recent decades. In this paper, an electroencephalography (EEG) study is presented regarding the cognitive processes of an instructed liar/truth-teller during the time window of stimulus (question) delivery period (SDP) prior to their deceptive/truthful responses towards questions related to authentic (WE: with prior experience) and fictional experience (NE: no prior experience). To investigate deception in non-experienced events, the subjects were given stimuli in a mock interview scenario that induced them to fabricate lies. To analyze the data, frequency domain network and connectivity analysis was performed in the source space in order to provide a more systematic level understanding of deception during SDP. This study reveals several groups of neuronal generators underlying both the instructed lying (IL) and the instructed truth-telling (IT) conditions for both tasks during the SDP. Despite the similarities existed in these group components, significant differences were found in the intra- and inter-group connectivity between the IL and IT conditions in either task. Additionally, the response time was found to be positively correlated with the clustering coefficient of the inferior frontal gyrus (44R) in the WE-IL condition and positively correlated with the clustering coefficient of the precuneus (7L) and the angular gyrus (39R) in the WE-IT condition. However, the response time was found to be marginally negatively correlated with the clustering coefficient of the secondary auditory cortex (42L) in the NE-IL condition and negatively correlated with the clustering coefficient of the somatosensory association cortex (5L, R) in the NE-IT condition. Therefore, these results provide complementary and intuitive evidence for the differences between the IL and IT conditions in SDP for two types of deception tasks, thus elucidating the electrophysiological mechanisms underlying SDP of deception from regional, inter-regional, network, and inter-network scale analyses.

A spatio-temporal filtering approach to denoising of single-trial ERP in rapid image triage.

Conventional search for images containing points of interest (POI) in large-volume imagery is costly and sometimes even infeasible. The rapid image triage (RIT) system which is a human cognition guided computer vision technique is potentially a promising solution to the problem. In the RIT procedure, images are sequentially presented to a subject at a high speed. At the instant of observing a POI image, unique POI event-related potentials (ERP) characterized by P300 will be elicited and measured on the scalp. With accurate single-trial detection of such unique ERP, RIT can differentiate POI images from non-POI images. However, like other brain-computer interface systems relying on single-trial detection, RIT suffers from the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the single-trial ERP. This paper presents a spatio-temporal filtering approach tailored for the denoising of single-trial ERP for RIT. The proposed approach is essentially a non-uniformly delayed spatial Gaussian filter that attempts to suppress the non-event related background electroencephalogram (EEG) and other noises without significantly attenuating the useful ERP signals. The efficacy of the proposed approach is illustrated by both simulation tests and real RIT experiments. In particular, the real RIT experiments on 20 subjects show a statistically significant and meaningful average decrease of 9.8% in RIT classification error rate, compared to that without the proposed approach.

Common spatio-temporal pattern for single-trial detection of event-related potential in rapid serial visual presentation triage.

Searching for target images in large volume imagery is a challenging problem and the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) triage is potentially a promising solution to the problem. RSVP triage is essentially a cortically-coupled computer vision technique that relies on single-trial detection of event-related potentials (ERP). In RSVP triage, images are shown to a subject in a rapid serial sequence. When a target image is seen by the subject, unique ERP characterized by P300 are elicited. Thus, in RSVP triage, accurate detection of such distinct ERP allows for fast searching of target images in large volume imagery. The accuracy of the distinct ERP detection in RSVP triage depends on the feature extraction method, for which the common spatial pattern analysis (CSP) was used with limited success. This paper presents a novel feature extraction method, termed common spatio-temporal pattern (CSTP), which is critical for robust single-trial detection of ERP. Unlike the conventional CSP, whereby only spatial patterns of ERP are considered, the present proposed method exploits spatial and temporal patterns of ERP separately, providing complementary spatial and temporal features for high accurate single-trial ERP detection. Numerical study using data collected from 20 subjects in RSVP triage experiments demonstrates that the proposed method offers significant performance improvement over the conventional CSP method (corrected p-value < 0.05, Pearson r = 0.64) and other competing methods in the literature. This paper further shows that the main idea of CSTP can be easily applied to other methods.