Detecting Concealed Information with Fused Electroencephalography and Functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy

In this study, fused electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) techniques were utilized to examine the relationship between the ERP (event-related potential) component P300 and fNIRS hemodynamic signals for high-accuracy deception detection. During the performance of a modified concealed information test (CIT) task, a series of Chinese names were presented, which served as the target, irrelevant, or the probe stimuli for both the guilty and innocent groups. For participants in the guilty group, the probe stimulus was their individual name, whereas for the innocent group, the probe stimulus was one irrelevant name. In particular, data from concurrent fNIRS and ERP recordings were carefully inspected for participants from the two groups. Interestingly, we discovered that for the guilty group, the probe stimulus elicited significantly higher P300 amplitude at parietal site and also evoked significantly stronger oxyhemoglobin (HbO) concentration changes in the bilateral superior frontal gyrus and bilateral middle frontal gyrus than the irrelevant stimuli. However, this is not the case for the innocent group, in which participants exhibited no significant differences in both ERP and fNIRS measures between the probe and irrelevant stimuli. More importantly, our findings also demonstrated that the combined ERP and fNIRS feature was able to differentiate the guilty and innocent groups with enhanced sensitivity, in which AUC (the area under Receiver Operating Characteristic curve) is 0.94 for deception detection based on the combined indicator, much higher than that based on the ERP component P300 only (0.85) or HbO measure only (0.84).