Preschoolers' deception related to prefrontal cortex activation: An fNIRS study.

Deception is an essential part of children's moral development. Previous developmental studies have shown that children start to deceive at the age of 3 years, and as age increased to 5 years, almost all children were able to deceive for their own benefit. Although behavioral studies have indicated that the emergence and development of deception are related to cognitive abilities, their neural correlates remain poorly understood. Therefore, the present study examined the neural correlates underlying deception in preschool-aged children (N = 89, 44 % boys, age 3.13 to 5.96 years, Han Chinese) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. A modified hide-and-seek paradigm was applied to elicit deceptive and truth-telling behaviors. The results showed that activation of bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was positively associated with the tendency to deceive an opponent in a competitive game in the 3-year-olds. In addition, 3-year-olds who showed a high tendency to deceive showed the same brain activation in the frontopolar area as 5-year-olds did when engaged in deception, whereas no such effect was found in 3-year-olds who never engaged in deception. These findings underscore the link between preschoolers' deception and prefrontal cortex function.

Combining recognition, conflict-monitoring and feedback-related ERPs to detect concealed autobiographical information.

This study examined the neural signatures associated with conflict-monitoring, recognition and feedback processing in a feedback Concealed Information Test (fCIT), and also examined whether all the ERPs can be used to detect concealed autobiographical information. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups (guilty or innocent) and then tested in the fCIT while undergoing electroencephalograms (EEGs). The results showed that the probe (participants' name) elicited a more negative N200, and a more positive recognition P300 than irrelevants among guilty participants. Additionally, feedback following the probe elicited a larger feedback P300 than feedback following irrelevants. Further, we found that three indicators, including the conflict-monitoring N200, recognition P300, and feedback P300, could significantly discriminate between guilty and innocent participants, whereas the FRN could not. Combining them is highly effective in discriminating between guilty and innocent participants (AUC = 0.91). These findings not only shed light on the neural processing of the fCIT but also suggest the potential of using the fCIT to detect concealed autobiographical information.

Neural mechanisms of deliberate dishonesty: Dissociating deliberation from other control processes during dishonest behaviors.

Numerous studies have sought proof of whether people are genuinely honest by testing whether cognitive control mechanisms are recruited during honest and dishonest behaviors. The underlying assumption is: Deliberate behaviors require cognitive control to inhibit intuitive responses. However, cognitive control during honest and dishonest behaviors can be required for other reasons than deliberation. Across 58 neuroimaging studies (1,211 subjects), we investigated different forms of honest and dishonest behaviors and demonstrated that many brain regions previously implicated in dishonesty may reflect more general cognitive mechanisms. We argue that the motivational/volitional dimension is central to deliberation and provide evidence that motivated dishonest behaviors recruit the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex. This work questions the view that cognitive control is a hallmark of dishonesty.

The moral barrier effect: Real and imagined barriers can reduce cheating.

This research presents a nudge-based approach to promoting honest behavior. Specifically, we introduce the moral barrier hypothesis, which posits that moral violations can be inhibited by the introduction of spatial boundaries, including ones that do not physically impede the act of transgressing. We found that, as compared to a no barrier condition, children cheated significantly less often when a barrier was strategically placed to divide the space where children were seated from a place that was associated with cheating. This effect was seen both when the barrier took a physical form and when it was purely symbolic. However, the mere presence of a barrier did not reduce cheating: if it failed to separate children from a space that was associated with cheating, children cheated as much as when there was no barrier at all. Taken together, these findings support the moral barrier hypothesis and show that even seemingly unremarkable features of children's environments can nudge them to act honestly.

The effect of mental countermeasures on a novel brain-based feedback concealed information test.

The feedback concealed information test (fCIT) is a novel form of the CIT, providing participants with feedback regarding their memory concealment performance. The fCIT utilizes event-related potentials (recognition-P300 and feedback-related event-related potentials) and has been shown to provide high efficiency in detecting information concealment. However, it is unclear how well the fCIT performs in the presence of mental countermeasures. To address this question, participants were trained to use countermeasures during fCIT. Results showed that the recognition-P300 efficiency decreased when participants used countermeasures. However, the efficiencies of feedback-related negativity and feedback-P300 were unchanged, with feedback-P300 still showing a high detection efficiency (AUC = 0.86) during countermeasures. These findings demonstrate the potential of fCIT for subverting countermeasures.

Young children form generalized attitudes based on a single encounter with an outgroup member.

The goal of the present research was to assess whether children's first interaction with a single outgroup member can significantly impact their general attitudes toward the outgroup as a whole. In two preregistered studies, 5- to 6-year-old Chinese children (total N = 147) encountered a Black adult from another country for the very first time, and they played a game together. General attitudes toward the outgroup were assessed using both implicit and explicit measures. In both studies, the interaction resulted in less negative explicit attitudes toward Black people, but more negative implicit attitudes. The results demonstrate for the first time that one encounter with a single outgroup member can impact children's general attitudes toward that group, and that it can have differential effects on implicit and explicit attitudes.

Culture influences the development of children's gender-related peer preferences: Evidence from China and Thailand.

Current understanding of how culture relates to the development of children's gender-related peer preferences is limited. To investigate the role of societal acceptance of gender nonconformity, this study compared children from China and Thailand. Unlike China and other cultures where the conceptualization of gender as binary is broadly accepted, individuals who identify as a nonbinary "third" sex/gender have been highly visible and tolerated in Thai society for at least several decades. Chinese and Thai 4- to 9-year-olds (N = 458) viewed vignettes of four hypothetical peers who varied on gender (i.e., boy vs. girl) and gender-typed toy play behavior (i.e., masculine vs. feminine), and were asked to give a friendship preference rating for each peer. Chinese, compared with Thai, children evidenced gender-related peer preferences that emerged earlier, remained more stable across age groups, and were relatively more biased against gender-nonconforming behavior. The only cultural similarity was in children's preference for peers who were of the same gender and/or displayed same-gender-typed behavior. Thus, while preference for peers who are of the same gender and/or display same-gender-typed behavior is common among children across cultures, the developmental onset and course of these preferences vary by culture. Moreover, societal acceptance of gender nonconformity might be key to limiting children's bias against gender-nonconforming peers.

Subtle alterations of the physical environment can nudge young children to cheat less.

Cheating is a common human behavior but few studies have examined its emergence during early childhood. In three preregistered studies, a challenging math test was administered to 5- to 6-year-old children (total N = 500; 255 girls). An answer key was present as children completed the test, but they were instructed to not peek at it. In Study 1, many children cheated, but manipulations that reduced the answer key's accessibility in terms of proximity and visibility led to less cheating. Two follow-up studies showed that the answer key's visibility played a more significant role than its proximity. These findings suggest that subtle and seemingly insignificant alterations of the physical environment can effectively nudge young children away from acting dishonestly.

The developmental origins of a default moral response: A shift from honesty to dishonesty.

People are sometimes tempted to lie for their own benefit if it would not harm others. For adults, dishonesty is the default response in these circumstances. The developmental origins of this phenomenon were investigated between 2019 and 2021 among 6- to 11-year-old Han Chinese children from China (N = 548, 49% female). Children had an opportunity to win prizes in a behavioral economics game (Experiment 1) or a temptation resistance game adapted from developmental psychology (Experiment 2). In each experiment, the youngest children showed a default tendency of honesty and there was an overall age-related shift toward a default tendency of dishonesty. These findings provide direct evidence of developmental change in the automatic and controlled processes that underlie moral behavior.

Context shapes early diversity in abstract thought.

Early abstract reasoning has typically been characterized by a "relational shift," in which children initially focus on object features but increasingly come to interpret similarity in terms of structured relations. An alternative possibility is that this shift reflects a learned bias, rather than a typical waypoint along a universal developmental trajectory. If so, consistent differences in the focus on objects or relations in a child's learning environment could create distinct patterns of relational reasoning, influencing the type of hypotheses that are privileged and applied. Specifically, children in the United States may be subject to culture-specific influences that bias their reasoning toward objects, to the detriment of relations. In experiment 1, we examine relational reasoning in a population with less object-centric experience-3-y-olds in China-and find no evidence of the failures observed in the United States at the same age. A second experiment with younger and older toddlers in China (18 to 30 mo and 30 to 36 mo) establishes distinct developmental trajectories of relational reasoning across the two cultures, showing a linear trajectory in China, in contrast to the U-shaped trajectory that has been previously reported in the United States. In a third experiment, Chinese 3-y-olds exhibit a bias toward relational solutions in an ambiguous context, while those in the United States prefer object-based solutions. Together, these findings establish population-level differences in relational bias that predict the developmental trajectory of relational reasoning, challenging the generality of an initial object focus and suggesting a critical role for experience.

Discrete emotions discovered by contactless measurement of facial blood flows.

ABSTRACTExperiential and behavioural aspects of emotions can be measured readily but developing a contactless measure of emotions' physiological aspects has been a major challenge. We hypothesised that different emotion-evoking films can produce distinctive facial blood flow patterns that can serve as physiological signatures of discrete emotions. To test this hypothesis, we created a new Transdermal Optical Imaging system that uses a conventional video camera to capture facial blood flows in a contactless manner. Using this and deep machine learning, we analysed videos of the faces of people as they viewed film clips that elicited joy, sadness, disgust, fear or a neutral state. We found that each of these elicited a distinct blood flow pattern in the facial epidermis, and that Transdermal Optical Imaging is an effective contactless and inexpensive tool to the reveal physiological correlates of discrete emotions.

Using environmental nudges to reduce academic cheating in young children.

Previous research on nudges conducted with adults suggests that the accessibility of behavioral options can influence people's decisions. The present study examined whether accessibility can be used to reduce academic cheating among young children. We gave children a challenging math test in the presence of an answer key they were instructed not to peek at, and manipulated the accessibility of the answer key by placing various familiar objects on top of it. In Study 1, we used an opaque sheet of paper as a two-dimensional occluder, and found that it significantly reduced cheating compared to a transparent plastic sheet. In Study 2, we used a three-dimensional occluder in the form of a tissue box to make the answer key appear even less accessible, and found it was significantly more effective in reducing cheating than the opaque paper. In Study 3, we used two symbolic representations of the tissue box: a realistic color photo and a line drawing. Both representations were effective in reducing cheating, but the realistic photo was more effective than the drawing. These findings demonstrate that manipulating accessibility can be an effective strategy to nudge children away from cheating in an academic context. They further suggest that different types of everyday objects and their symbolic representations can differentially impact children's moral behavior.

Theory of mind, executive function, and lying in children: a meta-analysis.

Scientific research on how children learn to tell lies has existed for more than a century. Earlier studies mainly focused on moral, social, and situational factors contributing to the development of lying. Researchers have only begun to explore the cognitive correlations of children's lying in the last two decades. Cognitive theories suggest that theory of mind (ToM) and executive function (EF) should be closely related to the development of lying since lying is, in essence, ToM and EF in action. Yet, findings from empirical studies are mixed. To address this issue, the current meta-analysis reviewed all prior literature that examined the relations between children's lying and ToM and/or between children's lying and EF. In total, 47 papers consisting of 5099 participants between 2 and 19 years of age were included, which yielded 74 effect sizes for ToM and 94 effect sizes for EF. Statistically significant but relatively small effects were found between children's lying and ToM (r = .17) and between lying and EF (r = .13). Furthermore, EF's correlation with children's initial lies was significantly smaller than its correlation with children's ability to maintain lies. This comprehensive meta-analysis provides a clear picture of the associations between children's ToM/EF and their lying behavior and confirms that ToM and EF indeed play a positive role in children's lying and its development.

The Role of Reward System in Dishonest Behavior: A Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study.

Previous studies showed that the cortical reward system plays an important role in deceptive behavior. However, how the reward system activates during the whole course of dishonest behavior and how it affects dishonest decisions remain unclear. The current study investigated these questions. One hundred and two participants were included in the final analysis. They completed two tasks: monetary incentive delay (MID) task and an honesty task. The MID task served as the localizer task and the honesty task was used to measure participants' deceptive behaviors. Participants' spontaneous responses in the honesty task were categorized into three conditions: Correct-Truth condition (tell the truth after guessing correctly), Incorrect-Truth condition (tell the truth after guessing incorrectly), and Incorrect-Lie condition (tell lies after guessing incorrectly). To reduce contamination from neighboring functional regions as well as to increase sensitivity to small effects (Powell et al., Devel Sci 21:e12595, 2018), we adopted the individual functional channel of interest (fCOI) approach to analyze the data. Specially, we identified the channels of interest in the MID task in individual participants and then applied them to the honesty task. The result suggested that the reward system showed different activation patterns during different phases: In the pre-decision phase, the reward system was activated with the winning of the reward. During the decision and feedback phase, the reward system was activated when people made the decisions to be dishonest and when they evaluated the outcome of their decisions. Furthermore, the result showed that neural activity of the reward system toward the outcome of their decision was related to subsequent dishonest behaviors. Thus, the present study confirmed the important role of the reward system in deception. These results can also shed light on how one could use neuroimaging techniques to perform lie-detection.

Neural correlates of spontaneous deception in a non-competitive interpersonal scenario: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) study.

This study aims to examine neural correlates of spontaneous deception in a non-competitive interpersonal situation, and the difference in neural correlates between spontaneous deception and instructed deception using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We used a modified poker game in which participants freely decided whether sending a piece of truthful/deceptive information to other participants. In the instructed session, participants sent truthful/deceptive information per the instructions. In this non-competitive interpersonal situation in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), deception produced higher neural activities than truth-telling. In addition, spontaneous deception exhibited higher neural activities than instructed deception in the frontopolar area, DLPFC, and frontal eye fields. Spontaneous truth-telling produced higher neural activities than instructed truth-telling in frontal eye fields and frontopolar area. This study provides evidence about neural correlates of spontaneous deception during non-competitive interpersonal scenarios and the difference between spontaneous deception and instructed deception.

The Effects of Race, Gender, and Gender-Typed Behavior on Children's Friendship Appraisals.

From a young age, children's peer appraisals are influenced by the social categories to which peers belong based on factors such as race and gender. To date, research regarding the manner in which race- and gender-related factors might interact to influence these appraisals has been limited. The present study employed an experimental vignette paradigm to investigate the relative influences of target peers' race, gender, and gender-typed behavior toward 4- to 6-year-old Chinese children's (N = 119, 62 girls, 57 boys) peer appraisals. Appraisals were assessed via (1) a rating scale measuring children's interest in being friends with a range of hypothetical target peers varying in race, gender, and gender-typed behavior, and (2) a forced-choice rank-order task in which children indicated their preferences for four hypothetical target peers who varied from themselves on either race, gender, or gender-typed behavior, or were similar to themselves on all three traits. There was little evidence to suggest children's rank-ordered peer preferences in relation to race were influenced by whether the other-race presented was White (preferred relatively more) or Black (preferred relatively less). In contrast, gender-related factors (i.e., rater gender, target gender, target gender-typed behavior) had more robust influences on peer preferences for both outcome measures. Gender-conforming peers were preferred over gender-nonconforming peers, and target boys displaying feminine behavior were less preferred than target girls displaying masculine behavior. The results help characterize cross-cultural (in)consistencies in children's social preferences in relation to peers' race and gender.

Shaping children's racial bias through interpersonal movement.

The early emergence of racial biases points to the urgent need to understand how interpersonal experiences might shape them. We examined whether interpersonal movement shapes racial biases among 4- to 6-year-old Chinese children who had no prior contact with Black people. In Experiment 1 (N = 134), children played a musical game, moving either in or out of synchrony with a Chinese or Black adult. In Experiment 2 (N = 30), children were merely exposed to a Black adult. Across the two experiments, we found that synchronous movement increased children's feeling of social closeness toward their movement partner to a greater extent than asynchronous movement regardless of the partner's race. After moving in or out of synchrony with the Chinese adult, synchrony selectively increased children's explicit positive pro-own-race bias. However, after moving in or out of synchrony with the Black adult, both movement styles reduced explicit anti-other-race bias. Experiment 2 ruled out mere exposure to an other-race person as a driving factor for these effects. Our results suggest that musical engagement may be a promising intervention for reducing negative intergroup biases.

A Long-Term Effect of Perceptual Individuation Training on Reducing Implicit Racial Bias in Preschool Children.

This study tracked the long-term effect of perceptual individuation training on reducing 5-year-old Chinese children's (N = 95, Mage  = 5.64 years) implicit pro-Asian/anti-Black racial bias. Initial training to individuate other-race Black faces, followed by supplementary training occurring 1 week later, resulted in a long-term reduction of pro-Asian/anti-Black bias (70 days). In contrast, training Chinese children to recognize White or Asian faces had no effect on pro-Asian/anti-Black bias. Theoretically, the finding that individuation training can have a long-term effect on reducing implicit racial bias in preschoolers suggests that a developmentally early causal linkage between perceptual and social processing of faces is not a transitory phenomenon. Practically, the data point to an effective intervention method for reducing implicit racism in young children.

Young children selectively ignore quality to promote self-interest.

Although there has been extensive research on how children distribute resources with respect to quantity, little is known about how these decisions are affected by resource quality. The current research addressed this question by conducting two preregistered studies in which 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old children (total N = 360) made anonymous distributions of high-quality and low-quality items. Quantitative fairness entailed distributing an equal number of items irrespective of quality, and qualitative fairness entailed distributing equal numbers of high-quality and low-quality items. In Study 1, a majority of 7-year-olds distributed resources equally between themselves and another child in terms of both quality and quantity, whereas a majority of 3- and 5-year-olds did so only in terms of quantity while giving themselves a qualitative advantage. In Study 2, a majority of children in all three age groups distributed resources equally between two other children in terms of both quality and quantity. Together with prior findings, these results suggest that children selectively ignore the dimension of quality when it serves their own interests. The results also show, for the first time, that by 7 years of age children consider quality even at the expense of their own interests and that children as young as 3 years have the capacity to take into account resource quality when making distributions.

Young children discover how to deceive in 10 days: a microgenetic study.

We investigated how the ability to deceive emerges in early childhood among a sample of young preschoolers (Mean age = 34.7 months). We did this via a 10-session microgenetic method that took place over a 10-day period. In each session, children played a zero-sum game against an adult to win treats. In the game, children hid the treats and had opportunities (10 trials) to win them by providing deceptive information about their whereabouts to the adult. Although children initially showed little or no ability to deceive, most spontaneously discovered deception and systematically used it to win the game by the tenth day. Both theory of mind and executive function skills were predictive of relatively faster patterns of discovery. These results are the first to provide evidence for the importance of cognitive skills and social experience in the discovery of deception over time in early childhood.