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

Eye movement patterns reflect human latent internal cognitive activities. We aim to discover eye movement patterns during face recognition under different conditions of information concealment. These conditions 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 and unfamiliar faces. We apply Hidden Markov models with Gaussian emission to generalise regions and trajectories of eye fixation points under the above four 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.