Neural Correlates Underlying Second-Order Deception:Using Individual Functional Channels Of Interest Approach With FNIRS

Previous studies focus on first-order deception in which the deceiver makes a false statement to deceive an unsuspecting opponent intentionally.However,second-order deception is very common in real life.Second-order deception refers to the situation whereby the deceivers are fully aware that the recipient is suspecting but still carry out intentional deceptive acts.The current study aims to study the neural correlates underlying second-order deception using Individual Functional Channels of Interest(f COI)approach with functional near-infrared spectroscopy(f NIRS).Forty-nine adults participated in the current study.All participants were asked to complete four tasks: a theory of mind(To M)task,a Stroop task,a Monetary Incentive Delay(MID)task,and a deception task.The To M task,Stroop task,and the MID task served as localizer tasks to identify f COIs for the To M,executive control,and reward system.In the deception task,participants were asked to play an interactive game with a confederate in a second-order session and a control session.In the seconder-order session,participants had to consider the confederate's suspicion and made a true or false statement to deceive the confederate(second-order deception).In the control session,participants did not need to consider the confederate's suspicion,and they just told the truth(first-order truth-telling),or made the false statement to deceive(first-order deception).Paired-sample t-tests were used to compare the hemoglobin responses of different f COIs among second-order deception,first-order deception,and first-order truth-telling conditions.The current research has achieved such conclusions:1.During the decision period,we found that the first-order truth-telling elicited greater activation than second-order deception in the To M network.2.During the action period,the results showed that the second-order deception elicited larger activation than first-order truth-telling in the executive functioning network.3.During the feedback period,we found that the successful trials elicited significantly greater neural responses than the failure trials whether deception or not in the reward system.The present findings were consistent with the previous study that second-order deception engages cortical executive and reward systems.Furthermore,the result shows that second-order deception has a different activation pattern with first-order deception.Different from that of the first-order deception,second-order deception have less involvement with the cortical To M system.