An attempt to detect concealed information in a spatial cueing paradigm

Abstract

The concealed information test (CIT) is an information detection method that estimates the presence or absence of memory by presenting multiple question items and comparing the responses to specific items with those to other items. On the other hand, conventional reaction time-based CIT (RT-CIT) tasks require targets in the same category as the question items, but this condition is a practical limitation. Here, we applied the spatial cueing task to create an RT-CIT method that can be implemented even when both question items and a target item are in different categories. The results of experiments manipulating the SOA between the preceding cue and the appearance of the target suggest that visual processing of the target differs depending on whether the preceding question item is concealed information or not.