Can YOU spot the liar? Researchers develop online game to help AI crack down on racial biases by analyzing over a million faces
- New effort aims to further understanding of lies based on facial and verbal cues
- The ADDR (Automated Dyadic Data Recorder) framework matches people up
- Then, one is instructed to lie or tell the truth; exchange is recorded and analyzed
- It hopes to minimize instances of racial and ethnic profiling from TSA at airports
Billions of dollars and years of study have been poured into research trying to discover if someone is lying or not.
Researchers from the University of Rochester are now using data science and an online crowdsourcing framework called ADDR (Automated Dyadic Data Recorder) to further understanding of deception based on facial and verbal cues.
By playing an online game, the researchers have already collected 1.3 million frames of facial expressions from 151 pairs of individuals in just a few weeks.
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Researchers from the University of Rochester are now using data science and an online crowdsourcing framework called ADDR (Automated Dyadic Data Recorder) to further understanding of deception based on facial and verbal cues
'Basically, our system is like Skype on steroids,' said Tay Sen, a PhD student in the lab.
The researchers have two people sign up on Amazon Mechanical Turk.
A video then assigns one person to be the describer and the other to be the interrogator. The describer is shown an image and told to remember as many details as possible.
They are then told to either lie or tell the truth to the interrogator, who is not aware of the instructions.
The interrogator asks a series of baseline questions not related to the image, in order to establish a 'personalized model'.
The questions included 'what did you wear yesterday?' — to provoke a mental state relevant to retrieving a memory — and 'what is 14 times 4?' — to provoke a mental state relevant to analytical memory.
The questions provide a baseline 'normal' response, as the interviewee has no incentive to lie.
By playing an online game, the researchers have already collected 1.3 million frames of facial expressions from 151 pairs of individuals in just a few weeks
'A lot of times people tend to look a certain way or show some kind of facial expression when they're remembering things,' Sen said. 'And when they are given a computational question, they have another kind of facial expression.'
The entire interaction is recorded on video for further analysis.
Data science allowed for the researchers to quickly analyze everything in a variety of new ways.
They used automated facial feature analysis software to identify which action units were being used in a given frame, and to assign a numerical weight to each.
An unsupervised cluster technique was then used to automatically find patterns.
'It told us there were basically five kinds of smile-related 'faces' that people made when responding to questions,' Sen said.
A version of the so-called Duchenne smile that extends to the muscles of the eye is most frequently associated with lying.
This is consistent with the 'Duping Delight' theory that 'when you're fooling someone, you tend to take delight in it,' Sen said.
A sign of truthfulness was when honest witnesses would contract their eyes, but not smile at all with their mouths.
'When we went back and replayed the videos, we found that this often happened when people were trying to remember what was in an image,' Sen said. 'This showed they were concentrating and trying to recall honestly.'
The researchers plan to further examine the data, as they realize there is far more for them to learn.
WHAT ARE THE NINE WAYS TO SPOT A LIAR?
The big pause: Lying is quite a complex process for the body and brain to deal with. First your brain produces the truth which it then has to suppress before inventing the lie and the performance of that lie.
This often leads to a longer pause than normal before answering, plus a verbal stalling technique like ‘Why do you ask that?’ rather than a direct and open response.
The eye dart: Humans have more eye expressions than any other animal and our eyes can give away if we’re trying to hide something.
When we look up to our left to think we’re often accessing recalled memory, but when our eyes roll up to our right we can be thinking more creatively. Also, the guilt of a lie often makes people use an eye contact cut-off gesture, such as looking down or away.
The lost breath: Bending the truth causes an instant stress response in most people, meaning the fight or flight mechanisms are activated.
The mouth dries, the body sweats more, the pulse rate quickens and the rhythm of the breathing changes to shorter, shallower breaths that can often be both seen and heard.
Overcompensating: A liar will often over-perform, both speaking and gesticulating too much in a bid to be more convincing. These over the top body language rituals can involve too much eye contact (often without blinking!) and over-emphatic gesticulation.
The more someone gesticulates, the more likely it is they might be fibbing (stock image)
The poker face: Although some people prefer to employ the poker face, many assume less is more and almost shut down in terms of movement and eye contact when they’re being economical with the truth.
The face hide: When someone tells a lie they often suffer a strong desire to hide their face from their audience. This can lead to a partial cut-off gesture like the well-know nose touch or mouth-cover.
Self-comfort touches: The stress and discomfort of lying often produces gestures that are aimed at comforting the liar, such as rocking, hair-stroking or twiddling or playing with wedding rings. We all tend to use self-comfort gestures but this will increase dramatically when someone is fibbing.
Micro-gestures: These are very small gestures or facial expressions that can flash across the face so quickly they are difficult to see. Experts will often use filmed footage that is then slowed down to pick up on the true body language response emerging in the middle of the performed lie.
The best time to spot these in real life is to look for the facial expression that occurs after the liar has finished speaking. The mouth might skew or the eyes roll in an instant give-away.
Heckling hands: The hardest body parts to act with are the hands or feet and liars often struggle to keep them on-message while they lie.
When the gestures and the words are at odds it’s called incongruent gesticulation and it’s often the hands or feet that are telling the truth.
Ethan Hoque, an assistant professor of computer science at the university, would like to dive deeper into the fact that interrogators unknowingly leak information when they are being lied to.
Interrogators demonstrate more polite smiles when they know they are hearing a falsehood. In addition, an examiner is more likely to return a smile by a lying witness than a truth-teller.
Looking at the interrogators' data could reveal useful information and could have implications for how TSA officers are trained.
'In the end, we still want humans to make the final decision,' Hoque says.
'But as they are interrogating, it is important to provide them with some objective metrics that they could use to further inform their decisions.'
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