Study of Neurocognitive Processes in a Paradigm of Information Concealment

Abstract

The work contains a brief overview of the results of a series of experiments using the methods of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and simultaneous registration of vegetative reactions using MRI-compatible polygraph (MRIcP), reflects the next stage in the development of domestic applied — forensic — psychophysiology and states the formation of a new — neuro-forensic — direction of neurobiological research. The work announces the creation of a technology for complex fMRI-MRIcP neurocognitive researches, promising for use in the interests of fundamental science and for a number of branches of practice. Here are the results of testing the effectiveness of this technology of fMRI-MRIcP research, performed on students of a technical university (23 male participants aged 22-23 years old). The experiments used, borrowed from forensic practice, “test with a hidden name” and “test for knowing the guilty”, simulating the concealment of personally significant information (stored in a person’s memory for decades) and situation- ally significant information (entered into a person’s memory an hour before experiment). An analysis of galvanic skin reactions and reactions in photoplethysmogram was carried out using a system for quantitative assessment of physiological data recorded using MRIcP during the simultaneous registration of fMRI. The high consistency of expert scoring and automatic quantitative assessment of polygrams has been confirmed, and ways to improve the automatic evaluation of data have been identified. The usefulness of the application of the system for quantitative assessment of physiological data and the method of “specifying the sample” (carried out with the help of MRIcP) for studying the functional connectivity of the brain areas when hiding personally and situationally significant information in selected forensic tests is shown.