An interfering Go/No-go task does not affect accuracy in a Concealed Information Test.
Following the idea that response inhibition processes play a central role in concealing information, the present study investigated the influence of a Go/No-go task as an interfering mental activity, performed parallel to the Concealed Information Test (CIT), on the detectability of concealed information. 40 undergraduate students participated in a mock-crime experiment and simultaneously performed a CIT and a Go/No-go task. Electrodermal activity (EDA), respiration line length (RLL), heart rate (HR) and finger pulse waveform length (FPWL) were registered. Reaction times were recorded as behavioral measures in the Go/No-go task as well as in the CIT. As a within-subject control condition, the CIT was also applied without an additional task. The parallel task did not influence the mean differences of the physiological measures of the mock-crime-related probe and the irrelevant items. This finding might possibly be due to the fact that the applied parallel task induced a tonic rather than a phasic mental activity, which did not influence differential responding to CIT items. No physiological evidence for an interaction between the parallel task and sub-processes of deception (e.g. inhibition) was found. Subjects' performance in the Go/No-go parallel task did not contribute to the detection of concealed information. Generalizability needs further investigations of different variations of the parallel task.
Ambach
Wolfgang
W
Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health, Freiburg, Germany. ambach@igpp.de
Stark
Rudolf
R
Peper
Martin
M
Vaitl
Dieter
D
D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D008192:Deception; D005260:Female; D005712:Galvanic Skin Response / Q000502:physiology; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D033182:Intention; D016015:Logistic Models; D008297:Male; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D011340:Problem Solving; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012016:Reference Values; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric