2024 Volume 22 Issue 1 Pages 61-73
The concealed information test (CIT) is a technique for detecting concealed information related to criminal activity by presenting a series of questions to examinees and comparing their responses. Notwithstanding active research into reaction time-based CITs (RT-CIT), their practical applications have been limited to CITs based on responses from the autonomic nervous system. This is due to methodological limitations inherent within the conventional RT-CIT paradigm that restrict questions to known case facts. To address these limitations, we test a novel RT-CIT task that utilizes “inhibition of return” (IOR); a phenomenon where target detection is delayed when subsequent stimuli appear at a cued location within the spatial cueing paradigm. Participants were required to perform the task while retaining a specific number concealed in memory. In Experiment 1, the results of exploratory analysis indicate that IOR was partially reduced when a cue represented concealed information. However, such results were not replicated in Experiment 2. We discuss the reasons for the low robustness of this effect and consider possible future developments.
