What Eye Tracking Reveals About Your Lying Eyes
Lie detection is a field that, with increasing security controls worldwide, is most certainly growing. A group of educational psychologists are using eye tracking technology in an effort to create a new alternative to polygraph lie detection. Recent research licensed by the University of Utah (where the research is taking place) to Credibility Assessment Technologies is a milestone for the industry and a promising hint of things to come.
Credibility Assessment Technologies (CAT) is based in Park City, Utah, and they were the first to license the new technology, bringing it closer to the marketplace. “The eye-tracking method for detecting lies has great potential,” says Gerald Sanders, Chairman of CAT. “It’s a matter of national security that our government agencies have the best and most advanced methods for detecting truth from fiction, and we believe we are addressing that need by licensing the extraordinary research done at the University of Utah.”
The University is one of the leading organizations in lie-detection research, and the recent licensing news helps maintain their already influential reputation in the industry. They’ve been a leader in the field for 30 years, and are taking the reigns as organizations and researchers move into further stages of lie-detection technology.
Lie detection using eye tracking has only been a recent development and eye tracking tech has made leaps and bounds in recent years, enabling further applications like these. The researchers at the University of Utah took advantage of substantial technological improvements within the eye tracking industry to introduce new ways to detect when a person is telling a lie. Instead of measuring a person’s emotional reaction to lying, eye tracking technology measures a person’s cognitive reaction.
In the tests, researchers record a number of measurements while a subject is answering a series of true or false questions on a computer. Researchers take measurements on a participant’s response time, reading and rereading time, amount of errors, and pupil dilation.
Lying requires more work than telling the truth, so researchers look for indications that the subject is working hard. For example, according to researchers, a person that’s not telling the truth may have dilated pupils and take longer to read and react to questions. Reactions times and slight physiological shifts are minute to say the least, and sophisticated measurement tools, like eye tracking, are necessary to measure the data.
The researchers say they’ve had great results from the experiments – as good as or better than the polygraph tests. This is very promising, given that they’re still in the early stages of study for this new method. Keep an eye out for more news in the next year coming out of the University of Utah.
‘You can’t hide your lyin’ eyes’: Eye-tracking lie-detection
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