fMRI in Detection of Deception

What is functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging? A magnetic field is passed through the organ of interest, the brain, during a psychological function— deception--causing the flow of oxygen (Oxy-Hemoglobin) to active parts of brain to “show” up as active fields. They are said to light up. Here is a slide of some deception areas:

There are typically LIE and TRUE conditions… *One subtracts the activation –the amount of lighting up-- of truth areas from lie areas. *But how does one know which areas to look in? I.e., what are the “regions of interest?”

First, one tries to identify what cognitive functions are involved in deception… For example, in most deception protocols, there is involvement of 1. Working memory, 2. Inhibitory control, 3. Task Switching

For example, here from a metanalytic review by Christ et al. (2009)… …are the foci in which various deception protocols cause cortical activation; do they all correspond to working memory, inhibitory control, and task switching localizations? (There are surely many areas…)

OK, in the following, we see Deception areas surrounded/bounded by black borders… …juxtaposed with cognitive function areas. Is there correspondence?

Then, there’s the familiar countermeasure problem: Here are the results of a paper* under review by Ganis, Rosenfeld, & Meixner. *A 3 ST protocol with both ERPs and fMRI (separate studies). The P300 part replicated Rosenfeld et al. (2004) exactly. fMRI results follow: