Action Dynamics of False Responding and Deception

Tracking arm-movement trajectories to expose the moment-to-moment competition between what a deceiver knows and what they intend to say.

Award: NSF (Role: PI)

A convincing deceiver must act in discordance with their knowledge of the truth. To do so requires the deceiver to resolve competition between what is known to be true and what is intended to be false. In this line of research, we investigate the temporal signatures of this competition by examining the action dynamics of arm movement while participants respond falsely or truthfully to various sources of information. To do so, we use a simple computer mouse and Nintendo Wiimote to track a continuous stream of x,y arm movement coordinates. This information not only extends traditional approaches that have collapsed deceptive behavior into ballistic reaction time movements, but provides a more sensitive measure to detect deception in the real-world.

Selected papers

  • Duran, N. D., Dale, R., & McNamara, D. S. (2010). The action dynamics of overcoming the truth. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17, 486–491. [PDF]
  • Duran, N. D., Dale, R., Kello, C. T., Street, C. N. H., & Richardson, D. C. (2013). Exploring the movement dynamics of deception. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 140. [PDF]
  • Tabatabaeian, M., Dale, R., & Duran, N. D. (2015). Self-serving dishonest decisions can show facilitated cognitive dynamics. Cognitive Processing, 16, 291–300. [PDF]
  • O’Hora, D., Redfern, S., Duran, N. D., Zgonnikov, A., & Sweeney, D. (2018). In-game motion dynamics provide a means of exploring the cognitive dynamics of deception. 2018 IEEE Games, Entertainment, Media Conference (GEM). [PDF]
  • Duran, N. D., Nicholson, S. P., & Dale, R. (2017). The hidden appeal and aversion to political conspiracies as revealed in the response dynamics of partisans. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 73, 268–278. [PDF]

See the full list on the publications page.