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fMRI Polygraph

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Studies are already being done to see if an MRI can detect lies any better than the traditional polygraph (which doesn't do a very good job of it). These studies are all testing the reactions to spoken questions though. An easier way, based on the latest findings, would be to ask nothing and just watch their reactions to pictures. The logic behind this approach is based on a recent study where people without any background in physics were shown a picture of two balls falling to the ground, a very large one and a small one. When the big ball appeared to be falling faster then the smaller one, the error-correcting portion of the brain didn't light up (contrary to reality, this was what the test subjects expected to happen). When a picture was shown with the balls falling at the same rate, the error-correction neurons fired up because the subjects thought something was amiss. People familiar with physics didn't react the same way.

So here's how it would work using crime scenes. Suspects would be shown pictures of the crime scene but a single detail in each of them would be radically altered (the blond turned into a redhead for example). Only that single detail would be different in the pictures. The error-correcting neurons wouldn't fire up in the brains of the innocent because they wouldn't have any idea of what the crime scene looked like to be begin with. The criminal on the other hand would realize something was wrong and his error-correcting neurons would fire up to resolve the discrepancy. It would be easy to find the top suspect this way without asking a single question.

—longshot9999, Nov 01 2004

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       //Studies are already being done//
Do you have a source? This sounds good.
—angel, Nov 01 2004
   

       angel - I read about the experiments in either New Scientist or Science News. I'll check when I get back home and add a link.
—longshot9999, Nov 01 2004
   

       This is a very interesting idea. It might be worth pursuing, but it seems there will be lots of hurdles to overcome.   

       What if the average person sees a crime scene as inherently wrong, so their error-correcting neurons would automatically fire as well.   

       Maybe this could be compensated for if there was a picture generated of the victim appearing to be alive and doing somthing perfectly normal at the scene of the crime, but with some significant details changed? Or maybe show each suspect a real photo and an altered photo. Someone with knowledge of the schene might react differently to the two pictures. Then again, someone innocent might be more horrified by the first than the second which was essentially the same as the first. Or perhaps one of the pictures would remind them of something familiar more than the other one...   

       Might it be possible for someone to train to pass this test? For example, if they expect to see something unexpected, maybe their neurons would only fire if they saw an unaltered image?   

       How do you figure out the expected reaction of an innocent person who is afraid of being falsely convicted. Their error-neurons could be fireing continuously since the whole situation is just wrong, but how do you find a test subject that you know is in that situation? I guess you could arrest someone at random and accuse them of the crime and see what their reaction is, but that doesn't sound very ethical.
—scad mientist, Nov 01 2004
   

       scad - I think the error-correcting neurons are located in a different section of the brain than the section which would fire off if an innocent person saw something abhorrent, or if they were worried about being falsely accused. As for the guilty party being able to train themselves to pass the test, that's an open question. They would be going into the situation with their intuition neurons already firing because they expected something to be wrong with the picture and might not be able to help looking for the discrepancies, even if unconsciously.   

       The link, when I get it, should give us more information.
—longshot9999, Nov 01 2004
   

       This is being done. They're measuring with an EEG a pulse that occurs about 40ms (?) after seeing something you're familiar with. So they show you a picture and can tell if you're familiar with it.   

       Problem is, 'Oh, that sweater the dead girl's wearing was on sale at Ross' will set it off, too. False positives are a Bad Thing(tm).
—Chrontius, Nov 01 2004
   

       A good & truly "half-baked" idea, but [-] as it puts us on the wrong path to the mind-police / 1984.   

       This is a long way from truly mind-reading, which would still not be a perfect way to prove guilt or innocence.
—sophocles, Nov 01 2004
   

       Chrontius - The idea isn't to spot what you're familiar with, it's to spot what happens when you intuitively think something is wrong with the picture. After deriving an average baseline for responses from multiple areas of the brain, the theory is that the neurons in the area linked to intuition would fire when there was a subtle alteration in the picture. I couldn't get a link to the New Scientist idea this idea was derived from so I'll quote the relevant piece of it here,   

       "Why is physics so difficult? ...Kevin Dunbar a cognitive scientist at Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire, and his colleagues scanned the brains of students while they watched a video demonstrating either classical Newtonian physics, in which a large and a small ball fall to the ground at the same speed, or the naive scenario, in which the larger ball drops faster. Those who had never studied physics showed activity in a part of the brain associated with error processing when they watched the Newtonian model, implying they thought there was something wrong with what they were watching. But the naive model sparked activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, normally active when someone thinks about a theory accepted as correct. Students of physics showed the opposite patterns, though even they had some prefrontal activity when watching the naive model, indicating they were still attached to this false but intuitive notion."   

       Substituting the 'guilty' and the 'innocent' in place of non-physics and physics students gave rise to the idea.
—longshot9999, Nov 02 2004
   

       An episode of mythbusters tried this. 2 out of 3 members of the build team were caught lying.   

       I'd say this is an expensive but promising technology. A must have for interrogations at Abu Ghirab.
—vmaldia, Oct 21 2008
   

       and you're going to differentiate the "intuition" that says 'hmm looks photoshopped", how ?
—FlyingToaster, Oct 21 2008
   


 

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