Your Eyes Say You're Lying: An Eye Movement Pattern Analysis for Face Familiarity and Deceptive Cognition

TL;DR

This study analyzes eye movement patterns to distinguish between truthful and deceptive face recognition, demonstrating that eye gaze behaviors significantly differ during deception, enabling potential detection of lying through eye tracking.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of Hidden Markov models with Gaussian emissions to classify cognitive states based on eye movement patterns during face recognition tasks.

Findings

Eye movement patterns differ significantly during deception.

Eye gaze regions vary with cognitive state.

Deception detection using eye movement analysis is feasible.

Abstract

Eye movement patterns reflect human latent internal cognitive activities. We aim to discover eye movement patterns during face recognition under different cognitions of information concealing. These cognitions include the degrees of face familiarity and deception or not, namely telling the truth when observing familiar and unfamiliar faces, and deceiving in front of familiar faces. We apply Hidden Markov models with Gaussian emission to generalize regions and trajectories of eye fixation points under the above three conditions. Our results show that both eye movement patterns and eye gaze regions become significantly different during deception compared with truth-telling. We show the feasibility of detecting deception and further cognitive activity classification using eye movement patterns.