Concealed information test using an attentional blink paradigm

The concealed information test (CIT) is a technique used to detect concealed crime-relevant information by presenting a series of questions to an examinee and analyzing their responses. The purpose of this study is to develop a CIT paradigm based on the attention blink (AB) phenomenon and to verify its applicability using target detection accuracy as an index. AB refers to the failure to detect the second of two temporally proximate targets. The experimental results demonstrated that participants who had encoded crime-relevant items were more likely to miss the second target when the first target was crime-relevant than when it was irrelevant (Experiment 1). In contrast, no such difference was observed for participants who had not encoded crime-related items (Experiment 2). The result of the ROC analysis showed that the accuracy of discrimination based on AB magnitude was comparable to some of the autonomic indicators used in the current polygraph CIT. These findings provide empirical support for the feasibility of using an attentional blink-based CIT.