Credibility Assessments: Operational Issues Technology Impact for Law Enforcement Applications

摘要

Law Enforcement personnel are faced with new challenges to rapidly assess the credibility of statements made by individuals in airports border crossings and a variety of environments not conducive to interviews. New technologies may offer assistance to law enforcement personnel in the interview and interrogation process. Additionally, homeland defense against terrorism challenges scientists to develop new methods of assessing truthfulness and credibility in humans. Current findings of four advanced research projects looking at emerging technologies in the credibility assessment are presented for discussion. This paper will discuss research efforts on four emerging technologies now underway at DoDPI and other institutions. These include: 1) Thermal Image Analysis (TIA); 2) Laser Doppler Vibrometry (LDV); 3) Eye Movement based Memory Assessment (EMMA); and 4) functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fNRI). A description each technique, the current state of these research efforts, and an overview of the potential for each of these emerging technologies will be provided. The Department of Defense Polygraph Institute (DoDPI) is a federally funded institution that provides graduate and continuing education courses in forensic psychophysiology. Its research mission is to advance and communicate the body of knowledge in the field of behavioral and psychophysiological detection of deception (PDD). Part of our mandate is to conduct developmental research on PDD techniques, instrumentation, and analytical methods. Even before the terror attacks of September 11th, we had undertaken an ambitious research program to revolutionize the approach to the detection of deception in humans. The goal remains to develop scientifically sound processes using the best techniques available and to field deploy these technologies in support of our customer missions.