Re. Lubow et O. Fein, PUPILLARY SIZE IN RESPONSE TO A VISUAL GUILTY KNOWLEDGE TEST - NEW TECHNIQUE FOR THE DETECTION OF DECEPTION, Journal of experimental psychology. Applied, 2(2), 1996, pp. 164-177
Researchers examined the effects of committing a mock crime on pupilla
ry response (PR) to photographs of crime-scene details. In Experiment
1, 70% of participants with guilty knowledge and 100% without such kno
wledge were correctly detected. In Experiment 2, electrodermal and PR
were recorded. For both measures, target items elicited larger respons
es than control items for guilty participants, but not for innocent on
es. Participants with guilty knowledge also had larger PRs on control
items than those without such knowledge. With PR, 50% of those who wer
e guilty and 100% of those who were innocent were correctly identified
. With electrodermal data, 55% of guilty and 93% of a innocent partici
pants were correctly identified. The results hold promise for the deve
lopment of a new method of criminal interrogation using PR to a visual
guilty knowledge test.