An Investigation of the Factors Related to Deception Processing

Models of deception processing suggest the use and manipulation of truthful and context relevant schema information to construct a lie. Debate exists, however, between a greater cognitive cost associated with lying compared to truth telling. Lying is proposed to be no more difficult than truth telling related to a path of least effort in processing, where lies are provided in contexts that truth telling would be difficult or resource demanding. Related to a working memory approach, however, lying will be more demanding than truth telling due to the additional processing steps in processing and the associated resource consumption of this. The role of additional factors upon processing is largely absent from current models despite a large body of work highlighting the impact these have. The work of this thesis investigated further into the processing of lies, their associated load, and the impact upon processing of factors of applied cognitive load and rehearsal. Facial stimuli were utilised with response time and response accuracy measured to provide a focus upon the cognitive mechanisms involved within processing as suggested in literature. Findings overall indicated a greater difficulty in the processing of lies compared to truth telling, a negative effect of applied load at the same magnitude for both truth and lie responses, a positive effect of truth rehearsal and no effect of lie rehearsal. A model of the processing of truths and lies is offered, with explanations of how each factor affects this processing expanding upon current deception processing models.