The present studies aimed at developing a lie detection paradigm immune to countermeasures, while the theoretical issues of top-down influence of task requirement on subliminal semantic priming were investigated. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented supraliminal acquaintance and non-acquaintance names, which were subliminally primed by another acquaintance or non-acquaintance names. The 4 conditions were: 1) supraliminal acquaintance name primed by subliminal acquaintance name (A-A), 2) supraliminal acquaintance name primed by subliminal non-acquaintance name (N-A), 3) supraliminal non-acquaintance name primed by subliminal acquaintance name (A-N), and 4) supraliminal non-acquaintance name primed by subliminal non-acquaintance name (N-N). While no significant effects were found in reaction time data, analysis on event-related potential (ERP) revealed significant differences between supraliminal acquaintance conditions with different primes (A-A and N-A). Spatial PCA revealed the following components: frontal-central-parietal, occipital-parietal, frontal and prefrontal. Temporal PCA revealed the following components: 36-324 ms, 332-516 ms, 524-668 ms, 676-908 ms, and 916-1396 ms. The N-A condition had more positive P300 amplitude than the A-A condition within 524-668 ms post-stimulus onset at both frontal-central-parietal and occipital-parietal regions, and within 916-1396 ms at occipital-parietal regions. No difference in ERP was found in conditions with supraliminal non-acquaintance names (A-N and N-N). This study was replicated. In Experiment 2, subjects were required to lie in A-N and N-N conditions, in contrast to Experiment 1, in which subjects lied in A-A and N-A conditions. No significant effect was found. In Experiment 3 the act of lying was removed and no significant differences were found. It is concluded that subliminal primes modulate ERP specifically in conditions with supraliminal acquaintance name and when the task requirement involves lying.

Last modified

• 08/07/2018

Creator

• Ming Lui

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2JD91

Subject

• Psychology

Keyword

• Psychology

Date created

• 2007-07-17

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright