abstract Sebastian Schindler

Sebastian Schindler (Universität Bielefeld, Germany)

Faking in various conditions - cerebral correlates of faking a Brief Implicit Association Test

Direct assessment of attitudes toward socially sensitive topics can be affected by deception attempts. Reaction-time based indirect measures, such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT), are not immune but less susceptible to such biases. Neuroscientific evidence shows that deception can evoke characteristic ERP differences. However, the cerebral processes involved in faking an IAT are still unknown. I will present our first studies investigating the ERP pattern and cortical generators of faking a Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT) on doping attitudes. In these studies, participants were either given an explicit faking strategy, were given no explicit faking strategy, or were first ego-depleted and given no explicit faking strategy. Cerebral activity during BIAT completion was assessed using high-density EEG. Event-related potentials results for faking are in line with findings from related forced-choice deception experiments. Further, ERP results and source estimations show also similarities to neuroscientific findings of response inhibition and suppression. Results indicate that faking reaction-time based tests can alter brain processes from early stages of processing and reveal the cortical sources of the effects. Analyzing the EEG helps to uncover response patterns in indirect attitude tests and broadens our understanding of the neural processes involved in such faking. This knowledge might be useful for uncovering faking in socially sensitive contexts, where attitudes are likely to be concealed.