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Bijdrage aan de Spui25-bijeenkomst De roman en het geschreven woord in tijden van technologisering, ter gelegenheid van de verschijning van Maxim Februari’s laatste boek De onbetrouwbare verteller. (Meer van dit in mijn nieuwe boek Frictie: Ethiek in tijden van dataïsme, dat in mei 2020 verschijnt bij De Bezige Bij.)--Talk held at the Spui25 event The Novel and the Written Word in Technological Times, celebrating the publication of Maxim Februari’s latest book De onbetrouwbare verteller (The Unreliable Narrator). More on this topic in my upcoming book on Friction: Ethics in Times of Dataism (in Dutch), May 2020, De Bezige Bij.
Naar aanleiding van een tentoonstelling over Graancirkels in Spaces in Den Haag worden enkele verschillende voorbeelden besproken en mogelijke verklaringen voor hun ontstaan.
Skilled actors rely on deception to disrupt the perceptual ability of opponents who seek to anticipate action intentions. Common-coding theory (Prinz, 1997) purports that action and perception share common origins in the brain, and therefore it seems plausible that the ability to ‘see through’ a deceptive action would be associated with a capacity to perform the same action. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the ability to perform a deceptive action would be related to the ability to perceive the same type of action. Fourteen skilled rugby players performed deceptive (side-step) and non-deceptive actions while running towards a camera. The deceptiveness of those participants was determined by testing the ability of a separate group of eight equally skilled observers to anticipate the impeding running directions using a temporally occluded video-based test. Based on the overall response accuracies, participants were separated into high- and low-deceptiveness groups. These two groups then themselves took part in a video-based test. Results revealed that the skilled deceivers had a significant advantage in their ability to better anticipate the action outcomes of highly deceptive actions. The skilled deceivers’ sensitivity to discriminate deceptive from non-deceptive actions was significantly better than that of less-skilled deceivers when viewing the most-deceptive actor. Moreover, the skilled perceivers performed actions that appeared to be better disguised than those of the less-skilled perceivers. These findings suggest that, consistent with common-coding theory, the perception of deceptive and non-deceptive actions is associated with the capability to produce deceptive actions and vice versa.
Understanding the actions of others is important for predicting whether their intentions are honest or deceitful. Common-coding theory [Prinz, W. (1997). Perception and action planning. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 9(2), 129-154. https://doi.org/10.1080/713752551] suggests that the capability to produce a deceptive action could influence the ability to perceive the same action (and vice versa), but can an actor easily fool themselves? The aim of this study was to investigate whether individuals are better able to anticipate the outcome of their own deceptive actions than when others anticipate those same actions. Eighteen skilled rugby players were filmed performing deceptive (side-step) and non-deceptive actions. Eight equally skilled rugby players anticipated the outcomes of the filmed actions (i.e., viewing deceptive actions generated by others) and, six-months after filming, the original group of eighteen rugby players anticipated the action outcome of their own deceptive actions (i.e., viewing self-generated deceptive actions). Results revealed that players were no better at anticipating the outcomes of their own actions than others were. Instead, the response behaviour of the individuals viewing their own actions was indistinguishable from that of others viewing the same actions. In contrast with what might be expected based on common-coding theory, these findings suggest that the typical advantage of self-observation might be negated when the observer has acquired considerable amounts of visual experience in that observation task.
Robot tutors provide new opportunities for education. However, they also introduce moral challenges. This study reports a systematic literature re-view (N = 256) aimed at identifying the moral considerations related to ro-bots in education. While our findings suggest that robot tutors hold great potential for improving education, there are multiple values of both (special needs) children and teachers that are impacted (positively and negatively) by its introduction. Positive values related to robot tutors are: psychological welfare and happiness, efficiency, freedom from bias and usability. However, there are also concerns that robot tutors may negatively impact these same values. Other concerns relate to the values of friendship and attachment, human contact, deception and trust, privacy, security, safety and accountability. All these values relate to children and teachers. The moral values of other stakeholder groups, such as parents, are overlooked in the existing literature. The results suggest that, while there is a potential for ap-plying robot tutors in a morally justified way, there are imported stake-holder groups that need to be consulted to also take their moral values into consideration by implementing tutor robots in an educational setting. (from Narcis.nl)
One major drawback of deception detection is its vulnerability to countermeasures, whereby participants wilfully modulate their physiological or neurophysiological response to critical guilt-determining stimuli. One reason for this vulnerability is that stimuli are usually presented slowly. This allows enough time to consciously apply countermeasures, once the role of stimuli is determined. However, by increasing presentation speed, stimuli can be placed on the fringe of awareness, rendering it hard to perceive those that have not been previously identified, hindering the possibility to employ countermeasures. We tested an identity deception detector by presenting first names in Rapid Serial Visual Presentation and instructing participants to lie about their own identity. We also instructed participants to apply a series of countermeasures. The method proved resilient, remaining effective at detecting deception under all countermeasures.
Background: Deceptive movements occur when an actor seeks to fake, hide or delay kinematic information about their true movement outcomes. The purpose of deceptive movements is to impair the perception of opponents (the ‘observer’) to gain an advantage over them. We argue though that a lack of conceptual clarity has led to confusion about what deception is and in understanding the different approaches by which an actor can deceive their opponent. The aim of this article is to outline a conceptual framework for understanding deceptive movements in sport. Main body: Adopting Interpersonal Deception Theory from the field of communication, we define deception as when an actor deliberately alters their actions in an attempt to impair the ability of an observer to anticipate their true action outcomes. Further, deception can be achieved either by what we define as deceit, the act of providing false information, or disguise, the act of concealing the action outcome. Skilled athletes often have actions that are difficult to anticipate, but an action is only classified as containing deception if the actor has explicit intent to deceive an observer. Having outlined the conceptual framework, we then review existing empirical findings on the skilled perception of deceptive movements considering the framework. This approach includes a critical evaluation of the mechanisms known to facilitate the perceptual ability to prevent being deceived, including a consideration of visual search strategies, confidence, the contribution of visual and motor experiences, and the influence of response biases and action capabilities on perceptual performance. Conclusion: The distinction between deceit and disguise particularly helps to show that most research has examined deceit, with little known about how an actor can more effectively disguise their action, or about how an observer can improve their ability to anticipate the outcome of disguised actions. The insights help to identify fruitful areas for future research and outline implications for skill acquisition and performance enhancement.
We propose a novel deception detection system based on Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP). One motivation for the new method is to present stimuli on the fringe of awareness, such that it is more difficult for deceivers to confound the deception test using countermeasures. The proposed system is able to detect identity deception (by using the first names of participants) with a 100% hit rate (at an alpha level of 0.05). To achieve this, we extended the classic Event-Related Potential (ERP) techniques (such as peak-to-peak) by applying Randomisation, a form of Monte Carlo resampling, which we used to detect deception at an individual level. In order to make the deployment of the system simple and rapid, we utilised data from three electrodes only: Fz, Cz and Pz. We then combined data from the three electrodes using Fisher's method so that each participant was assigned a single p-value, which represents the combined probability that a specific participant was being deceptive. We also present subliminal salience search as a general method to determine what participants find salient by detecting breakthrough into conscious awareness using EEG.
