Lecture #8

• Reaction Time, P300s CITS

o Experiment: Mock Crime:
 Steal a ring from a drawer. A watch there too.
 On the CIT there are 3 stimuli:
 Probe: ring. Press left.
 Irrels: Bracelet, Necklace, Pin, Brooch. Press left.
 Group 1 Target: (Unf)Tiarra . Press right. OR
 Group 2 Target: (F)Watch . Press right.
 Target forces suspect to pay attention.
 These 3 types shuffled, presented in random order.
o Difference in result is the CIT effect
o Familiarity fillers (mine) and unfamiliar fillers (yours, not mine, theirs, others)
 Sprinkled in
o Makes you think about what pertains to you and what does not

o Reaction times show are guilty knowledge indicator—will take participants

longer to react when they are knowingly telling a lie
o Independent variable:
 Target type (unfam vs. familiar)
 Probe vs. Irrelevant
o Dependent variables:
 Reaction Time, P300 (Brain waves)
 o Only use separate variance t if the SD difference is more than 1/3 (one is 1/3 of
the others)
Lecture #8 & 9
• How do you evaluate if a CIT is a good CIT?
• The research question: is the CIT test a good test?
o Not really a manipulation in this study
o How do you answer it?
 Suppose you are knowledgeable (guilty)
 Test should declare you guilty
 Suppose you are not knowledgeable (innocent)
 Test should declare innocent
 Leakage problems—you may be innocent when reading guilty for other
reasons
• Signal Detection Theory (SDT) can also be used to evaluate a diagnostic procedure
(e.g., CIT, X-ray, biopsy), as well as an individual
o Without SDT, you can (by way of evaluation of a CIT) compare hit rates and false
alarm rates between groups. But to determine these rates, you need to adopt a
criterion—and these can vary between experiments, experimenters, and response
indices (ANS, P300, RT… also called D.V.s).
o Since the SDT-based ROC area (or d’) represents ALL criteria (= Betas), it is
preferred.
• As variability decreases, participants get more and more alike
• F= (Variance between conditions)/ (variance within conditions)

Lecture #10
• Autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT) and Implicit Association Test (IAT)
o The theory of the IAT is simple
 Suppose it’s Trump vs. Lincoln
 There are two critical test blocks
 1. Congruent: Lincoln and good things on same key (if you really
prefer Lincoln). Trump and bad things on the same key
  2. Incongruent: Lincoln and bad things are on the same key (if you
really prefer Lincoln), Trump and good things on the same key (if
you really prefer Lincoln to Trump)
Lecture #11
 Lukacs and the effects of fillers
o Familiarity fillers improved the classic multiple-probe protocol
o Improve the validity of reaction based memory detection
 Adding familiarity-related fillers to standard 3SP
o Familiars (‘familiar’, ‘recognized’ ‘mine’) vs.
o Unfamiliar (‘unfamiliar’, ‘unknown’, ‘other’, ‘theirs’, ‘them’, ‘foreign’)
 Result= Fillers help a lot
o Confidence interval much higher with AUC in ROC test

 Why do the fillers so greatly improve the RT CIT?

o Perhaps because they get you thinking about what’s yours—your name– versus

what’s not yours—like other names.

o Items that get you thinking and alerted to something are called priming stimuli

 We will do something very similar with 2 new wrinkles:

o 1. Record brain waves—P300s as well as RTs

 o 2. Instead of testing you on names, we will test on a detail of a mock crime you

commit in the lab

 Ecological validity—is it lifelike? The conditions should mimic a realistic scenario

Paper 3

 Where are the experimental questions you can ask about the data in this file?

o Is D-score effected by political party

 T-test: between groups

 ANOVA—square root of F gets you the t

o Is D-score effected by gender?

 Same analysis as above

 t-test 2-group between party and d-score

o Pooled variance t—are the SDs different? Not really

Lecture #12

 Confidence intervals: if .5 is not in the confidence interval, considered to be significant

o +/- 2 SDs is 95% of the area, which is what the confidence interval shows

Lecture #13

 IAT is a test for your true versus false attitudes or beliefs—such as political parties

 aIAT is a test of things you may have done, part of your autobiography

 Sensitivity is the accuracy is detecting guilty participants in this study

 Essence of the aIAT: key comparison blocks 5 and 3

 Subtract RT5-RT3 and divide by pooled SD, if you are guilty block 3 is congruent and

block 5 is incongruent

 6 experiments:

o 1: Arbitrarily defined guilty sentences as sentences referring to the 4 of diamonds,

and innocent sentences as sentences referring to the 7 of clubs. The mean D index

was positive for the group who selected the 4 of diamonds and negative for the

group who selected the 7 of clubs (0.62 vs. 0.49).

o 2: Mock Crime

 In this experiment, participants in the guilty group simulated a

theft, whereas those in the innocent group simply read a press

report on the same event.

 Significant difference found

o 3: The guilty sentences referred to past heroin or cocaine usage, whereas the

innocent sentences referred to non-usage of heroin and cocaine.

o 4: Goal was to determine whether the aIAT could correctly identify the actual last

vacation taken by examinees. Critical comparison was between a block in which

 the last vacation taken was paired with true sentences and a fabricated last

vacation was paired with false sentences and a block in which the last vacation

taken was paired with false statements and the fabricated vacation with true

statements

 Mean RT was faster for congruent blocks than for incongruent blocks

o 5: High Ecological Validity

 o 6:

 Found strong association between the guilty and true statements

Lecture #14

 The aIAT is a very promising instrument, but it may be beatable

o Berschuere et al: study claims to beat the test by slowing congruents

o Agosta et al: Says they can catch those that slow down the congruents

o Hu: Can speed up incongruents and beat test—but fails to report the necessity for

much practice

 4 groups given 2 blocks each

 Repetition: completed aIAT a second time

 Practice: repeats the incongruent block three times

 Instruction: repeated twice and were instructed to speed up

responses to incongruents

 Training: instructed to speed up responses in incongruent group,

repeated the test three times

 History of P300-based CITS

o Thought to be NOT counter-able because one cannot voluntarily directly control

amplitude of P300

 Yet, depending on the protocol, there may be indirect ways

o Fabiani, Gratton and Donchin (1984)

 Reported that participants initially exposed to word lists and later asked to

discriminate between 60 of these older words and 60 new words showed

larger P300s to the correctly recalled previously seen words

o Rosenfeld (88) subjects selected an object from a black painted cigar box, the

probe(“chosen”) that also contained irrels (“novel”) and target (“TBY”). The first

published 3SP.
o Rosenfeld (91): based on student crimes or anti-social acts

 Fake ID, Cheating, Plagiarizing, etc.

 Filled out a list in perceived privacy (actually under video surveillance)

 D and A are thrown out

 B= Probe

 Results: a P300 is seen in the guilty group for the relevant question

(probe)

 87% accurate
  The study had countermeasures

 Rosenfeld et al. (2004) and Mertens, Allen et al. (2008): These

methods are vulnerable to Counter-measures (CMs) via turning I’s

into covert T’s

 Old P300 Protocol

o 1 of 3 Stimuli on each trial: Probe (P), or Irrelevant(I), or Target (T). Subject

presses either Target or Non-Target (NT) button. Both P and I can be Non-

Targets. Special I is defined T.

o This leads to 2 tasks for each stimulus:

 1. implicit probe recognition vs.

 2. explicit Target/Non-Target discrimination

o Possible Result: Mutual Interference more task demand  reduced P300 to P.

CMs hurt Old test.

o A counter measure is an attempt to defeat the test by converting irrelevants into

covert targets

 How to do counter measures

 o When you see a specific irrelevant, SECRETLY make some response,

mental/physical.

o After all, if you can make special response to TARGET on instruction from

operator, you can secretly instruct yourself.

o Irrelevant becomes secret target. It makes big P300. If P = I, no diagnosis.

 Rosenfeld et al (2004) illustrates that counter measures can beat the test

 New complex trial protocol (CTP)

o Stimulus 1: Probe/Irrelevant

o Mask 1: response: “I saw it”—perception acknowledgment

o Stimulus 2: Target/non-target

o Mask 2: response target/non-target

 2 stimuli, separated by about 1s, per trial

 Stimulus 1; Either P or I, then S2 ; either T or NT.

 *There is no conflicting discrimination task when P is presented, so

P300 to probe is expected to be as large as possible due to P’s salience,

which should lead to good detection; 90-100 % in Rosenfeld et al.(2008)

with autobiographical information. It is also CM resistant. (Delayed T/NT

still holds attention.)

 * “I saw it” response to S1. Reaction time indexes counter measure use.
Lecture #15

 EXP 1: How does this CTP do in detecting incidental mock crime details?

o Subjects were divided into three groups (n=12)

 Simple Guilty (SG), Countermeasure (CM), and Innocent Control (IC)

o All subjects first participated in a baseline reaction time (RT) test in which they

chose a playing card and then completed the CTP using cards as stimuli.

o SG and CM subjects then committed a mock crime.

 Subjects stole a ring out of an envelope in a professor’s mailbox. Subjects

were never told what the item would be, to ensure any knowledge would

be incidentally acquired through the commission of the mock crime.

o All subjects were then tested for knowledge of the item that was stolen. There

were 1 Probe (the ring) and 6 Irrelevants (necklace, watch, etc.).

o CM subjects executed covert assigned responses to irrelevant stimuli in an

attempt to evoke P300s to these stimuli to try and beat the Probe vs. Irrelevant

P300 comparison.

o
Reaction times to S1 (P or I)

Condition Base-P Base-Iall Exp-P Exp-Iall

SG 402 391 393 393

CM 484 460 807 1197

IC 469 442 394 397

o As with autobiographical information, the CTP was found to be highly sensitive

at detecting incidentally acquired concealed knowledge in a mock-crime scenario.

o Detection rates using the CTP compare favorably to similar polygraph CITs. The

main advantage of the CTP over the old P300 or polygraph CIT is its resistance to
 CM use. The traditional covert-response CMs used to defeat past P300 CITs were

found to be ineffective against the CTP, and actually led to larger Probe-Irrelevant

amplitude differences and detection rates.

o CM use was also easily identified by a large increase in RT between the baseline

and experimental blocks.

 New Study with autobiographical info—2 mental counter measures to 4 irrelevants

o So now we have a 5-button box for the left hand. The subject is instructed to

press, at random, one of the 5 buttons as the “I saw it” response to S1 on each

trial with no repeats. T and NT (S2) stimuli and responses are as previously.

o We also hoped that this would make CMs harder to do. It didn’t, but we caught

the CM users anyway.

o Design:

 Autobiographical information (birthdates): One P and 4 I (other, non-

meaningful dates).

 3 Groups as before: SG, CM, IC.

 NEW: mental CMs to only 2 of the 4 Irrelevants: Say to yourself your

first name was the CM1, your last name as CM2. These are assigned prior

to run.

 *Why 2 irrels? Meixner & Rosenfeld (2010) showed countering all Irrels,

not probe gives probe extra, special significance. They did a study with

only 5 irrels, one of which was not countered. It had big P300. So, doing

CMs to all irrels is not a good strategy from perp’s perspective.

  *Why mental CMs? They should be faster and a bigger challenge for our

CTP.

 Only one block per group (no baseline).

o Results:

Group BT/Iall BT/Imax (largest irrelevant)

SG 13/13 (100%) 13/13 (100%)

IC 1/13 (7.6%) 1/13 (7.6%)

CM 12/12 (100%) 10/12 (83%)

Reaction times to “I saw it” in this study clearly index use of CMs
 Countermeasure times are all elevated because the subjects have to think about if they are

applying a counter measure on that stimuli

 New Study: Effects of various numbers of CMs, 1-5, with 5 total stimuli

o Found 4/5 CM was the most effective

 A Mock Terrorism Study

o How do you catch bad guys before crimes are committed, and before you know

what was done, where, when?