Speaker
Description
Introduction: The investigation of the neural mechanisms underlying deceptive behavior has historically attracted great interest due to its potential applications in forensic and legal contexts. Over the past decades, research on lie detection has transitioned from behavioral and physiological methodologies to the application of neuroimaging techniques. Among these, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been employed to identify neural activations associated with deception. However, significant heterogeneity across experimental designs and substantial overlap between deception-related activations and domain-general cognitive processes raise concerns about the functional selectivity of these neural markers. Methods: This study conducted a coordinate-based meta-analysis using Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) to assess convergence across deception-related fMRI findings and applied Bayesian Factor Modeling (BACON) to evaluate the functional selectivity of the identified clusters. 50 task-based fMRI experiments, comprising 873 participants and 468 activation foci, were included. Results: ALE analysis highlighted nine significant clusters (FWE-corrected at p < 0.05), primarily located in frontal, parietal, and subcortical regions. Behavioral profiling associated these clusters mainly with executive and memory-related processes. Interestingly, BACON analysis revealed that none of these brain regions met the criterion for strong deception-selectivity (posterior probability threshold P ≥ 0.95). Conclusion: These findings suggest, therefore, that deceptive behavior predominantly engages distributed cognitive control networks rather than specialized neural mechanisms uniquely dedicated to deception. This underscores the necessity of employing more ecologically valid paradigms in future studies and highlights the ongoing challenge of identifying neural markers that are uniquely related to deceptive intent.
