People encounter and battle with deception daily. Police officers are challenged by the determination of the perpetrator in a crime; medical professionals seek accurate accounts from their patients for diagnostic purposes; employers determine if candidates are right for a job based in the statements provided; and a parent wants to know if their child is lying. Deception is not directly observable, which makes detecting challenging for humans; hence, a move towards machines to do so, especially via neuroimaging techniques. One of those technologies is the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which measure brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow.

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This project is an Actor-Network theory (ANT) account of how a test questioning paradigm, associated with fMRI lie detection technologies, studies deception. The Concealed Information Test (CIT) is an indirect test that asks for crime-related knowledge. The premise of the test is that only a guilty person would know the answer to the question, thereby reacting to the correct response. An innocent person would not show any different neural reactions since they would not have the specific crime-related knowledge.

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Researchers are attempting to locate deception in the brain, and provide logical, scientific, and technical means to detect deception. Each CIT study is attempting to build on previous studies within and outside of the paradigm to detect deception. The scientific evidence is viewed as unbiased, ideology-free, and as a good representation of the truth. The goal of my research is not to evaluate the quality of scientific knowledge, but rather to understand the process of gaining knowledge: by what means do CIT researchers produce facts about lies? Seeking to look through the lens of Bruno Latour and using 11 CIT-fMRI laboratory studies, this research project traces how CIT-fMRI knowledge is made by the alliance of humans and non-humans. The objective of this research is to show that science is suffused by uncertainties, which demonstrates the need to democratize science.