Feedback To Deny The True Identity And The Ability To Fabricate New Identities And The Difference Between The Two Forms Of Deceit

Interpersonal deception is common in our daily life. It refers to deliberately concealnig the true knowledge from others and making a deceptive response. As a conflicting response to being honest, being deceptive requires an individual to inhibit the prompt honest response and transform it into a willed deceptive mode. Therefore, compared with being honest, being deceptive involves more working memory resources. As a result, deception is more taxing than honesty.Denial and fabrication are two common subtypes of deception. They share some features in common while they are distinct from each other. For example, in the process of denial, a person needs to inhibit the tendeny to be honest, turning the honest response into a willed deception and consistently monitoring the ongoing dishonest response. However, in the process of faking, an individual has to maintain the new information in the working memory and keep vigilant in case of truth leakage. As deception on identity is ubiquitous among crimes, our study focuses on the theme and aims to compare the two deception from the perspective of cognitive control.Self-information enjoys uniqueness. Studies on self-face recogniton showed that compared with other’s face, self-face enjoys the efficiency in identity discrimination. Evience from response inhibition showed that when self-information is task-irrelevant, the interference effect caused by self-face is equivalent to that of other’s face. When participants were asked to inhibit the repsonse to target faces, withholding response to self-face is much faster than to other’s face. The results suggest the flexible modulation of cognitive resources deployed by self. However, it remains a question how self modulates the cognitive processes in identity deception which is also an inhibitory task. To provide the answer, we conducted two experiments under the frame of identity deception.Study 1 compared the temporal courses of denying true identity and faking a new identity. A differetiation of deception task was employed in which participants were asked to respond deceptively and honestly to both self and stranger’s identity information. In the task, participants needed to answer whether the identity was mine or not. Results showed that the RT cost(RT for deception minus that for honesty) was heavior for denying self-identity(denying the self-identity was mine) compared with that for faking a new identity(acknowledging the stranger’s identity was mine). In addition, denying self-identity caused a more negative deflection of N2 than faking a new identity. As for LPC, it was observed that denying self-dientity caused a more reduced LPC(LPC for being honest minus that for being deceptive) than faking a new identity. Our results indicated that more response conflict is brought about by denying self-identity compared with faking a new identity. Denying self-identity is more taxing than faking a self-identity.Study 2 aimed to reveal the response adjustment in deception. To meet the end, a feedback followed after a response was given. Our results showed that compared with escaping from being caught in deception, being caught in deception elicited a more negative MFN component and N5 component, as well as a more positive P3, indicating more rapid evalution for negative outcomes than for positive ones. Relative to escaping from being caught for lynig about self-identity, being caught for lying about self-identity induced more errors in lying on the followed trials, while it was reversed for lying about a stranger’s identity. The results suggested that negative feedback played a role as punishment for lying about self-identity, which undermines the accuracy for subsequent lying. However, the adjustment of behavioral performances was prompted by the negative feedback for lying about stranger’s identity. Results from ERPs demonstrated that a more positive deflection of P2 was envoked by the feedback of escaping from being caught for lying about self-identity than the feedback of being caught for lying about self-identity only in the condition where one was denying his/her true identity. This was attributed to the enhanced attention to self-identity after positive feedback for lying about self-identity, which reuslted in the difficulty of disengaging attention from the self-information and to perform the willed deception. And in consistent with this, the longest RTs for lying about self-identity was found than any other conditions after the feedback of escaping from being caught by previously denying self-identity. Our results indicated the flexible deployment of cognitive resources to adapt self to the environment, however, it seems that the taxing feature of lying about self-identity was hard to manipulate.