Silent Talker Lie Detector
Encyclopedia
The Silent Talker Lie Detector is a lie detector
which observes and analyses non-verbal behaviour
in the form of micro-gestures while a subject is being interviewed. It is grounded in the psychological theory that non-verbal behaviour is modified by a number of influences when a person is being deceptive. These include arousal
(in particular stress
), cognitive load
, duping delight, and behaviour control.
, Zuhair Bandar, David McLean, James O’Shea and Janet Rothwell. Following its invention, the Silent Talker Adaptive Psychological Profiling architecture and its specific instantiation as a lie detector, were patented internationally. In the interim, the inventors have been involved in raising investment funding and the code has been ported to various programming languages and speeded up from near real-time to real-time response. A study is currently underway to adapt the technology to the measurement of comprehension amongst participants giving informed consent to take part in clinical trials.
No calibration is required to tune the system to individuals and no training of the interviewer is required to interpret the Silent Talker classifications.
. Modern analysis of non-verbal behaviour at a fine-grained temporal level has its origins in the work of Efron. Investigations of training humans to detect truth and deceit conducted by Vrij et al. provide evidence to support the effectiveness of non-verbal behaviour as a predictive feature.
Artificial neural networks have been described as having a "remarkable ability to derive meaning from complicated or imprecise data, can be used to extract patterns and detect trends that are too complex to be noticed by either humans or other computer techniques.", they have been established as a subfield of Artificial Intelligence for over 60 years and are the subject of dedicated, high impact journals such as Neural Networks. Consequently they provide a scientifically credible basis for Silent Talker's classifiers.
The distinctive features of Silent Talker are:
Silent Talker has been published in peer-reviewed journals for both the Psychology and Artificial Intelligence communities.
``
The Guardian newspaper
The Times newspaper
BBC Radio 4 The material World
BBC Television News
CBS Television News
ABC Radio news
The Engineer
The Scottish Herald
The Futurist
Lie detection
Lie detection is the practice of attempting to determine whether someone is lying. Activities of the body not easily controlled by the conscious mind are compared under different circumstances. Usually this involves asking the subject control questions where the answers are known to the examiner...
which observes and analyses non-verbal behaviour
Nonverbal communication
Nonverbal communication is usually understood as the process of communication through sending and receiving wordless messages. Messages can be communicated through gestures and touch , by body language or posture, by facial expression and eye contact...
in the form of micro-gestures while a subject is being interviewed. It is grounded in the psychological theory that non-verbal behaviour is modified by a number of influences when a person is being deceptive. These include arousal
Arousal
Arousal is a physiological and psychological state of being awake or reactive to stimuli. It involves the activation of the reticular activating system in the brain stem, the autonomic nervous system and the endocrine system, leading to increased heart rate and blood pressure and a condition of...
(in particular stress
Stress (biology)
Stress is a term in psychology and biology, borrowed from physics and engineering and first used in the biological context in the 1930s, which has in more recent decades become commonly used in popular parlance...
), cognitive load
Cognitive load
The term cognitive load is used in cognitive psychology to illustrate the load related to the executive control of working memory . Theories contend that during complex learning activities the amount of information and interactions that must be processed simultaneously can either under-load, or...
, duping delight, and behaviour control.
History
Silent Talker was invented between 2000 and 2002 by a team at Manchester Metropolitan UniversityManchester Metropolitan University
Manchester Metropolitan University is a university in North West England. Its headquarters and central campus is in the city of Manchester, but there are outlying facilities in the county of Cheshire. It is the third largest university in the United Kingdom in terms of student numbers, behind the...
, Zuhair Bandar, David McLean, James O’Shea and Janet Rothwell. Following its invention, the Silent Talker Adaptive Psychological Profiling architecture and its specific instantiation as a lie detector, were patented internationally. In the interim, the inventors have been involved in raising investment funding and the code has been ported to various programming languages and speeded up from near real-time to real-time response. A study is currently underway to adapt the technology to the measurement of comprehension amongst participants giving informed consent to take part in clinical trials.
Testing procedure
The subject of the interview is observed by one or more cameras (e.g. head-and-shoulders, full body view, thermal imaging camera), which input the video stream to a conventional computer. As the interview takes place, Silent talker’s model of truthful vs. deceptive behaviour is used to classify the answers to the questions as truthful or deceptive in real-time. This can be as a classification at the end of the answer to a question or as a continuous monitoring stream during the interview.No calibration is required to tune the system to individuals and no training of the interviewer is required to interpret the Silent Talker classifications.
Validity
The fundamental phenomenon behind Silent Talker is non-verbal behaviour. Non-verbal behaviour is a well-established field of academic study with its origins in the work of Charles DarwinCharles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
. Modern analysis of non-verbal behaviour at a fine-grained temporal level has its origins in the work of Efron. Investigations of training humans to detect truth and deceit conducted by Vrij et al. provide evidence to support the effectiveness of non-verbal behaviour as a predictive feature.
Artificial neural networks have been described as having a "remarkable ability to derive meaning from complicated or imprecise data, can be used to extract patterns and detect trends that are too complex to be noticed by either humans or other computer techniques.", they have been established as a subfield of Artificial Intelligence for over 60 years and are the subject of dedicated, high impact journals such as Neural Networks. Consequently they provide a scientifically credible basis for Silent Talker's classifiers.
The distinctive features of Silent Talker are:
- It uses banks of Artificial Neural Network classifiers to identify features
- It uses further banks of Artificial Neural Network classifiers to detect microgestures
- The microgestures are coded into channels over a time period.
- The relationships between events in the channels over the time period are analysed by Artificial Neural Networks to make the classification.
- The Artificial Neural Networks were trained using video data collected from experiments
- Thus the classifier Artificial Neural Networks discovered which features were important and the relationships between them that discriminate between deceptive and truthful non-verbal behaviour.
Silent Talker has been published in peer-reviewed journals for both the Psychology and Artificial Intelligence communities.
``
Countermeasures
As other lie detectors detect changes in stress, the most common approach is to disrupt this either by practicing calming techniques during lying or artificially raising stress during truth-telling. Because Silent Talker is based on a multi-factor model including cognitive load, duping delight and behaviour control, its inventors claim that it is robust to countermeasures. In fact it is believed that because a large number of channels are used, attempts at behaviour control will generate more incongruities between channels which can be detected. Further experimental trials are required to investigate this hypothesis.External links
The Independent newspaper- http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/truth-machine-means-liars-must-keep-a-straight-face-604482.html
The Guardian newspaper
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/jun/19/labour.comment
The Times newspaper
- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article438756.ece
BBC Radio 4 The material World
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/thematerialworld_20030130.shtml
BBC Television News
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2944563.stm
CBS Television News
- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/01/28/tech/main538242.shtml
ABC Radio news
- http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2009/2674304.htm
The Engineer
- http://www.theengineer.co.uk/in-depth/the-truth-will-out/278743.article
The Scottish Herald
- http://www.heraldscotland.com/truth-behind-an-industry-full-of-fibs-1.840722
The Futurist
- http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/futurist/results.html?QryTxt=New+System+Reads+Body+Language.+The+Futurist