In this study, we propose an approach to detect deception during investigative interviews by integrating response latency and error analysis with the unexpected question technique. Sixty participants ...were assigned to an honest (n = 30) or deceptive group (n = 30). The deceptive group was instructed to memorize the false biographical details of a fictitious identity. Throughout the interviews, participants were presented with a randomized sequence of control, expected, and unexpected open-ended questions about identity. Responses were audio recorded for detailed examination. Our findings indicate that deceptive participants showed markedly longer latencies and higher error rates when answering expected (requiring deception) and unexpected questions (for which premeditated deception was not possible). Longer response latencies were also observed in participants attempting deception when answering control questions (which necessitated truthful answers). Moreover, a within-subject analysis highlighted that responding to unexpected questions significantly impaired individuals' performance compared to answering control and expected questions. Leveraging machine-learning algorithms, our approach attained a classification accuracy of 98% in distinguishing deceptive and honest participants. Additionally, a classification analysis on single response levels was conducted. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of merging response latency metrics and error rates with unexpected questioning as a robust method for identity deception detection in investigative interviews. We also discuss significant implications for enhancing interview strategies.
Autobiographical memory is the capacity to recollect memories of personally experienced events. The detection of such memories plays a key role in criminal trials. Among behavioral memory-detection ...methods, the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT) has gained popularity for its flexibility and suitability for forensic applications. The aIAT is a reaction time-based methodology aiming to assess whether information about an event is encoded in the respondent's mind. Here, we introduced the
index, a measure based on the topography of fixations while performing the aIAT, as an additional measure to detect autobiographical memories covertly.
In this study, participants were involved in a mock-crime experiment in which they could act as Guilty or Innocent. One week later all participants underwent the aIAT combined with eye-tracking to investigate the presence of the crime-related memory.
Guilty participants showed a higher number of fixations towards the category labels in the block in which true sentences shared the same response key with crime-related sentences, as compared to the block in which true sentences were paired with sentences describing an alternative version. Innocent participants showed the opposite pattern. This unbalanced allocation of attention to the category labels was quantified by the eye-D index and was found to be highly correlated to the standard aIAT-D index.
This suggests that more fixations to the category labels could indicate increased cognitive load and monitoring of response conflicts. These preliminary results highlight eye-tracking as a tool to detect autobiographical memories covertly while performing the aIAT.
Social isolation due to COVID-19 pandemic has an important psychological impact particularly in persons with dementia and their informal caregivers.
To assess frequency and severity of long-term ...stress-related symptoms in caregivers of patients with dementia 1-year after the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic and to identify predictors of psychological outcomes.
Eighty-five caregivers were involved in a longitudinal study with 1-year follow-up during pandemic in Italy. At baseline in April 2020 a telephone interview assessed socio-demographic characteristics of caregivers and self-perception of distress symptoms. After 1 year, between March and April 2021, the same standardized interview was delivered to the caregivers' sample. In addition, scales assessing levels of depression and anxiety (DASS-21), sleep disturbances (PSQI) and coping strategies (COPE-NVI) were administered to the caregivers and to 50 age and sex-matched non-caregivers subjects. Linear regression analysis was performed to investigate the power of baseline variables to predict long-term psychological outcomes.
After 1 year of pandemic frequency of caregivers' stress-related symptoms increased respect to baseline: depression (60 vs. 5, 9%;
< 0.001), anxiety (45, 9 vs. 29, 4%;
= 0.035), irritability (49, 4 vs. 24, 7%;
< 0.001), and anguish (31, 7 vs. 10, 6%;
< 0.001). Frequency of severe depression was higher in caregivers than in non-caregivers (
= 0.002) although mean levels of depression were comparable in the two groups. Long-term higher depression was predicted by a model built on baseline information (r
= 0.53,
< 0.001) where being female (t = -3.61,
< 0.001), having lower education (t = -2.15,
= 0.04), presence of feelings of overwhelm (t = 2.29,
= 0.02) and isolation (t = 2.12,
= 0.04) were significant predictors. Female sex was also predictive of anxiety (t = -2.7,
= 0.01) and poor sleep quality (t = -2.17,
= 0.03).
At 1 year follow-up caregivers of patients with dementia reported higher prevalence of all stress-related symptoms respect to the acute phase of lockdown, particularly depression. Long-lasting stressful conditions may cause exhaustion of resilience factors and increased depression. Planning interventions should support caregivers to enable them to continue with their role during pandemic.
During visual exploration, eye movements are controlled by multiple stimulus- and goal-driven factors. We recently showed that the dynamics of eye movements -how/when the eye move- during natural ...scenes' free viewing were similar across individuals and identified two viewing styles: static and dynamic, characterized respectively by longer or shorter fixations. Interestingly, these styles could be revealed at rest, in the absence of any visual stimulus. This result supports a role of intrinsic activity in eye movement dynamics. Here we hypothesize that these two viewing styles correspond to different spontaneous patterns of brain activity. One year after the behavioural experiments, static and dynamic viewers were called back to the lab to record high density EEG activity during eyes open and eyes closed. Static viewers show higher cortical inhibition, slower individual alpha frequency peak, and longer memory of alpha oscillations. The opposite holds for dynamic viewers. We conclude that some properties of spontaneous activity predict exploratory eye movement dynamics during free viewing.
When looking at visual images, the eyes move to the most salient and behaviourally relevant objects. Saliency and semantic information significantly explain where people look. Less is known about the ...spatiotemporal properties of eye movements (i.e., how people look). We show that three latent variables explain 60% of eye movement dynamics of more than a hundred observers looking at hundreds of different natural images. The first component explaining 30% of variability loads on fixation duration, and it does not relate to image saliency or semantics; it approximates a power-law distribution of gaze steps, an intrinsic dynamic measure, and identifies observers with two viewing styles: static and dynamic. Notably, these viewing styles were also identified when observers look at a blank screen. These results support the importance of endogenous processes such as intrinsic dynamics to explain eye movement spatiotemporal properties.
•Focal lesions like stroke and tumors cause highly-impacting cognitive impairment.•Pathophysiological mechanism (acute vs low-growing) affects differently the brain.•Focal lesions show a ...low-dimensional characterization of cognitive impairment.•Lesion location is correlated with cognitive deficits only in stroke, not in tumor.
Neuropsychological studies infer brain-behavior relationships from focal lesions like stroke and tumors. However, these pathologies impair brain function through different mechanisms even when they occur at the same brain’s location. The aim of this study was to compare the profile of cognitive impairment in patients with brain tumors vs. stroke and examine the correlation with lesion location in each pathology.
Patients with first time stroke (n = 77) or newly diagnosed brain tumors (n = 76) were assessed with a neuropsychological battery. Their lesions were mapped with MRI scans. Test scores were analyzed using principal component analysis (PCA) to measure their correlation, and logistic regression to examine differences between pathologies. Next, with ridge regression we examined whether lesion features (location, volume) were associated with behavioral performance.
The PCA showed a similar cognitive impairment profile in tumors and strokes with three principal components (PCs) accounting for about half of the individual variance. PC1 loaded on language, verbal memory, and executive/working memory; PC2 loaded on general performance, visuo-spatial attention and memory, and executive functions; and, PC3 loaded on calculation, reading and visuo-spatial attention. The average lesion distribution was different, and lesion location was correlated with cognitive deficits only in stroke. Logistic regression found language and calculation more affected in stroke, and verbal memory and verbal fluency more affected in tumors.
A similar low dimensional set of behavioral impairments was found both in stroke and brain tumors, even though each pathology caused some specific deficits in different domains. The lesion distribution was different for stroke and tumors and correlated with behavioral impairment only in stroke.
•Most cognitive functions did not show significant worsening one week after surgery as compared to baseline before surgery.•Pre-operative neuropsychological testing outperformed tumor topography in ...predicting post-surgical cognitive functions.•It is possible to make individualized outcome predictions from pre-surgery information.
Gliomas are commonly characterized by neurocognitive deficits that strongly impact patients’ and caregivers’ quality of life. Surgical resection is the mainstay of therapy, and it can also cause cognitive impairment. An important clinical problem is whether patients who undergo surgery will show post-surgical cognitive impairment above and beyond that present before surgery. The relevant rognostic factors are largely unknown.
This study aims to quantify the cognitive impairment in glioma patients 1-week after surgery and to compare different pre-surgical information (i.e., cognitive performance, tumor volume, grading, and lesion topography) towards predicting early post-surgical cognitive outcome.
We retrospectively recruited a sample of N = 47 patients affected by high-grade and low-grade glioma undergoing brain surgery for tumor resection. Cognitive performance was assessed before and immediately after (∼1 week) surgery with an extensive neurocognitive battery. Multivariate linear regression models highlighted the combination of predictors that best explained post-surgical cognitive impairment.
The impact of surgery on cognitive functioning was relatively small (i.e., 85% of test scores across the whole sample indicated no decline), and pre-operative cognitive performance was the main predictor of early post-surgical cognitive outcome above and beyond information from tumor topography and volume. In fact, structural lesion information did not significantly improve the accuracy of prediction made from cognitive data before surgery.
Our findings suggest that post-surgery neurocognitive deficits are only partially explained by preoperative brain damage. The present results suggest the possibility to make reliable, individualized, and clinically relevant predictions from relatively easy-to-obtain information.
Several investigations have shown that the processing of self-relevant information differs from processing objective information. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of social stimuli ...on subjective time processing. Here, social stimuli are images of an unknown male and female person and an image of participants’ self. Forty university students were tested with a time reproduction task in which they were asked to reproduce the duration of the stimulus previously presented. Images of others or themselves were used to mark the temporal intervals. Participants also performed questionnaires to evaluate the level of anxiety and depression as well as self-consciousness. A generalised linear mixed-effects model approach was adopted. Results showed that male participants with higher Private Self-Consciousness scores showed higher time perception accuracy than females. Also, female participants reported higher scores for the Public Self-Consciousness subscale than male participants. The findings are discussed in terms of social context models of how attention is solicited and arousal is generated by social stimuli, highlighting the effect of social context on subjective perception of time.
Several investigations have shown that the processing of self-relevant information differs from processing objective information. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of social stimuli ...on subjective time processing. Here, social stimuli are images of an unknown male and female person and an image of participants' self. Forty university students were tested with a time reproduction task in which they were asked to reproduce the duration of the stimulus previously presented. Images of others or themselves were used to mark the temporal intervals. Participants also performed questionnaires to evaluate the level of anxiety and depression as well as self-consciousness. A generalised linear mixed-effects model approach was adopted. Results showed that male participants with higher Private Self-Consciousness scores showed higher time perception accuracy than females. Also, female participants reported higher scores for the Public Self-Consciousness subscale than male participants. The findings are discussed in terms of social context models of how attention is solicited and arousal is generated by social stimuli, highlighting the effect of social context on subjective perception of time.
During normal aging, the brain undergoes structural and functional changes. Many studies applied static functional connectivity (FC) analysis on resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging ...(rs‐fMRI) data showing a link between aging and the increase of between‐networks connectivity. However, it has been demonstrated that FC is not static but varies over time. By employing the dynamic data‐driven approach of Hidden Markov Models, this study aims to investigate how aging is related to specific characteristics of dynamic brain states. Rs‐fMRI data of 88 subjects, equally distributed in young and old were analyzed. The best model resulted to be with six states, which we characterized not only in terms of FC and mean BOLD activation, but also uncertainty of the estimates. We found two states were mostly occupied by young subjects, whereas three other states by old subjects. A graph‐based analysis revealed a decrease in strength with the increase of age, and an overall more integrated topology of states occupied by old subjects. Indeed, while young subjects tend to cycle in a loop of states characterized by a high segregation of the networks, old subjects' loops feature high integration, with a crucial intermediary role played by the dorsal attention network. These results suggest that the employed mathematical approach captures the complex and rich brain's dynamics underpinning the aging process.
Normal aging is associated with brain structural and functional changes. In this study, we applied the dynamic data‐driven approach of Hidden Markov Models on resting state functional MRI data of 88 subjects, equally distributed in young and old, to investigate how aging is related to specific characteristics of dynamic brain states. After estimating six states, we found that two states were mostly occupied by young subjects, whereas three other states by old subjects. A decrease in strength with the increase of age, and an overall more integrated topology of states occupied by old subjects were also observed.
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