William B. McGregor

Detecting deception: the scope and limits

With the increasing interest in the neuroimaging of deception and its commercial application, there is a need to pay more attention to methodology. The weakness of studying deception in an experimental setting has been discussed intensively for over half a century. However, even though much effort has been put into their development, paradigms are still inadequate. The problems that bedevilled the old technology have not been eliminated by the new. Advances will only be possible if experiments are designed that take account of the intentions of the subject and the context in which these occur.

The production and detection of deception in an interactive game.

This experiment tests how people produce and detect deception while playing a computerized version of the dice game, Meyer. Deception is an integral part of this game, and the participants played it as in real life, without constraints on whether or when to attempt to deceive their opponent, and whether or when to accuse them of deception. We stress that deception is a complex act that cannot be exclusively associated with telling a falsehood, and that it is facilitated by hierarchical decision-making and risk evaluation. In comparison with a non-competitive control condition, both claiming truthfully and claiming falsely were associated with activity in fronto-polar cortex (BA10). However, relative to true claims, false claims were associated with greater activity in the premotor and parietal cortices. We speculate that the activity in BA10 is associated with the development of high-level executive strategies involved in both types of claim, while the premotor and parietal activity is associated with the need to select which particular claim to make.

What if I Get Busted? Deception, Choice, and Decision-Making in Social Interaction.

Deception is an essentially social act, yet little is known about how social consequences affect the decision to deceive. In this study, participants played a computerized game of deception without constraints on whether or when to attempt to deceive their opponent. Participants were questioned by an opponent outside the scanner about their knowledge of the content of a display. Importantly, questions were posed so that, in some conditions, it was possible to be deceptive, while in other conditions it was not. To simulate a realistic interaction, participants could be confronted about their claims by the opponent. This design, therefore, creates a context in which a deceptive participant runs the risk of being punished if their deception is detected. Our results show that participants were slower to give honest than to give deceptive responses when they knew more about the display and could use this knowledge for their own benefit. The condition in which confrontation was not possible was associated with increased activity in subgenual anterior cingulate cortex. The processing of a question which allows a deceptive response was associated with activation in right caudate and inferior frontal gyrus. Our findings suggest the decision to deceive is affected by the potential risk of social confrontation rather than the claim itself.

Typology of Ergativity

Ergativity refers to patterning in a language whereby the subject of a transitive clause behaves differently to the subject of an intransitive clause, which behaves like the object of a transitive clause. Ergativity can be manifested in morphology, lexicon, syntax, and discourse organisation. This article overviews what is known about ergativity in the worlds languages, with a particular focus on one type of morphological ergativity, namely in case-marking. While languages are rarely entirely consistent in ergative case-marking, and the inconsistencies vary considerably across languages, they are nevertheless not random. Thus splits in case-marking, in which ergative patterning is restricted to certain domains, follow (with few exceptions) universal tendencies. So also are there striking cross-linguistic commonalities among systems in which ergative case-marking is optional, although systematic investigation of this domain is quite recent. Recent work on the diachrony of ergative systems and case-markers is overviewed, and issues for further research are identified.

When Pinocchio's nose does not grow: belief regarding lie-detectability modulates production of deception

Does the brain activity underlying the production of deception differ depending on whether or not one believes their deception can be detected? To address this question, we had participants commit a mock theft in a laboratory setting, and then interrogated them while they underwent functional MRI (fMRI) scanning. Crucially, during some parts of the interrogation participants believed a lie-detector was activated, whereas in other parts they were told it was switched-off. We were thus able to examine the neural activity associated with the contrast between producing true vs. false claims, as well as the independent contrast between believing that deception could and could not be detected. We found increased activation in the right amygdala and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), as well as the left posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), during the production of false (compared to true) claims. Importantly, there was a significant interaction between the effects of deception and belief in the left temporal pole and right hippocampus/parahippocampal gyrus, where activity increased during the production of deception when participants believed their false claims could be detected, but not when they believed the lie-detector was switched-off. As these regions are associated with binding socially complex perceptual input and memory retrieval, we conclude that producing deceptive behavior in a context in which one believes this deception can be detected is associated with a cognitively taxing effort to reconcile contradictions between ones actions and recollections.

The Semantics and Pragmatics of Irrealis Mood in Nyulnyulan Languages

The languages of the small Nyulnyulan family of the far northwest of Western Australia all exhibit a grammatical category traditionally dubbed irrealis. In this paper we describe the grammatical expression of this category, and its range of meanings and uses. It is argued that these can be accounted for as contextual senses or pragmatic inferences based on a single encoded core meaning, that the referent situation is construed by the speaker as unrealized. This semantic component remains invariant across all uses of the category, and is not defeasible. Contra claims by some investigators, the realis-irrealis mood contrast is fundamental, and encapsulates a viable conceptual contrast between real and unreal events; epistemic and deontic notions of probability, necessity, desirability, and the like are secondary pragmatic inferences. The irrealis is thus a modal category that can grammaticalize in human languages; indeed, it is a communicatively useful category. We explicate the nature of the conceptual contrast between the construed real and unreal. It is further argued that the notion of scope is essential to an understanding of the irrealis, and its interaction with other mode-like categories. Finally, we situate the Nyulnyulan irrealis in the wider cross-linguistic context of irrealis.

Ergative Marking of Intransitive Subjects in Warrwa

As in a number of ergative languages, the ergative case-marker -na∼-ma in Warrwa is occasionally found on the subject of intransitive clauses, indeed even on the subject of verbless clauses. I argue that the presence vs. absence of the ergative marker in this environment is not random free variation, but is motivated and highly constrained. The paper is concerned with identifying the motivations. It is proposed, based on an investigation of uses in a corpus of narrative and other texts, that two features are relevant: (a) semantic—the subject is highly agentive; and (b) referential—the identity of the subject is not predictable: it is unexpected. Use of the ergative on an intransitive subject thus highlights both the agentivity and the unexpectedness of the subject. I argue that, contrary to recent claims by some, Warrwa is not an active language: it is not the case that -na∼-ma groups together some intransitive and transitive subjects, while zero marking groups some intransitive subjects with transitive objects; these groupings are, I argue, purely formal and epiphenomenal. Finally, I situate optional marking of intransitive subjects in Warrwa in a wider theory of optional case marking.

Optionality in grammar and language use

Abstract This paper investigates optionality in grammar and language use, and argues that there is optionality and optionality, and thus that it is essential that we be much more careful than hitherto in categorizing linguistic entities as optional. Equipped with a suitably constrained construal of the term, it is possible to formulate testable generalizations about optionality. Specifically, it is always meaningful in the sense that the contrast between use and non-use of a given linguistic element conveys meaning; use and non-use are never in absolutely free variation. Furthermore, there are restrictions on the type of meaning associated with the two contrasting paradigmatic “forms”. It is always a type of interpersonal meaning, concerning the domain of joint attention. It is further suggested that the connection between form and meaning is motivated, and thus this represents another domain in which the linguistic sign emerges as non-arbitrary. Evidence for the proposed meaning is presented from case studies of five diverse domains of grammar: complementizers, case markers, definiteness markers, person and number markers, and NP ellipsis. While these case studies only scratch the surface of the range of optional phenomena in the world’s languages, they provide sufficient circumstantial evidence to make an initial case for the proposals; they also raise numerous questions for future investigation.

Response to Haynes: There's more to deception than brain activity

Haynes outlines a programme for using the new voxel-wise categorization technique in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for detecting deception [1]. The imaging methodologies he proposes are undoubtedly the best currently available. However, they depend on the existence of independent categorization of deceptive and non-deceptive intentions in each of the subjects being scanned, which is the weak point of his proposal. Valid experimental paradigms for eliciting deception are still required, and such paradigms will be particularly difficult to apply in real-life settings.

The nothing that is, the zero that isn't

The need for zero in linguistic description is widely agreed upon, and few linguists would want to eliminate the concept entirely: grammatical descriptions would become too complicated and run the risk of losing important generalisations. Nevertheless, one needs to exercise caution in postulating zeros, in presuming that some element of linguistic form is actually present when there is no manifest substance. This article has three main aims. One is to examine the notion of zero in linguistics, and discuss circumstances under which it is reasonable to postulate its presence in the face of nothing in the expression-substance. A second is to argue that in certain circumstances it is useful to identify not zeros of grammatical form, but rather nothings - thus the nothing that is! Third, the need for a reappraisal of the notion of zero in linguistics is suggested: this mathematical metaphor is misleading, and should be replaced by a less dangerous one.