Detecting Concealed Knowledge through Attentional Capture in RSVP

Drgalová, Nastasia (2025) Detecting Concealed Knowledge through Attentional Capture in RSVP. Bachelor thesis, Psychology.

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Abstract

Identifying the presence of deception in forensic settings is essential for upholding accountability, justice and the safety of society at large. Nevertheless, the current methods of deception detection lack applicability, reliability and resistance to countermeasures. With the aim to reduce the likelihood of countermeasure use, we utilized the method of rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) to investigate whether attentional capture by episodic memory traces could indicate the presence of concealed knowledge. By instructing participants to imagine either neutral or theft scenarios, including distinct face-object-scene triads, we aimed to foster episodic memory encoding with stimuli which would later serve as probes in a recognition task and critical distractors in an RSVP task. We predicted that presenting a previously encoded scene image and a target image in close temporal succession would result in lower target identification due to attentional capture by the former stimulus (Hypothesis 1). With the assumption that the presentation of an encoded probe would cause pattern completion and subsequent activation of its episodic associates, the onset of an associated stimulus was predicted to cause an especially pronounced capture effect (Hypothesis 2). Lastly, by instructing participants in the theft scenario to apply any strategy to obscure the truth regarding probe recognition, we expected greater latency for deceptive responses than for truthful ones (Hypothesis 3). Contrary to our first two hypotheses, the results indicate that the presentation of an encoded scene did not impact target detection performance. However, we did provide evidence for the association between deceitful responding and response latency. Furthermore, by computing d-prime values from responses to recognition probes, we were able to differentiate between deceivers and truthtellers with an accuracy of 0.88.

Item Type:	Thesis (Bachelor)
Supervisor name:	Nieuwenstein, M.R. and Akyurek, E.G.
Degree programme:	Psychology
Differentiation route:	None [Bachelor Psychology]
Date Deposited:	10 Jul 2025 07:36
Last Modified:	10 Jul 2025 07:36
URI:	http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/5428

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